Source: NC (official Steam store listing). Verified against multiple sources; datamines and reports are labelled as such, not stated as fact.
What NC Put On Sale
Three tiers, one head start, and two sets of servers that open on different days.
The first five days of a brand-new MMO world now cost $24.99, and they happen somewhere most players cannot go. That is the actual product NC put on sale on July 22, 2026, and it is a stranger thing to sell than a skin.
The AION 2 Founder's Pack comes in three tiers: $24.99 Standard, $49.99 Deluxe and $99.99 Ultimate. All three grant the same 5-Day Advanced Access, and the official Steam listing dates that Advance Access to September 30, 2026, describing it as playing "the game starting 5 days ahead of full release". Everything else is dress-up. Standard adds a Daeva's Campaign Supply Chest and the Unique-grade title "Vanguard of Atreia". Deluxe layers on the "Ascended Daeva" armor set and the "Eternal Sun" weapon skin. Ultimate throws in a styling chest, the "Moonlit Aria" armor, a Black Dragon pet and Blazing Sun Wings.
Days earlier NCsoft published a notice explaining how the head start actually works, and that notice is the real story. Aion 2 will run two kinds of server. Early access servers open first, for people who bought a pack. Launch servers open later, when the game goes free-to-play. Without a pack you can still get onto an early access server, but only if there is space, and getting off one afterward is the harder problem: NCsoft says it will consider server transfers after it evaluates populations and congestion, which commits the company to nothing.
The plumbing that stitches the two populations back together all arrives afterward. Cross-server friends lists and cross-server queues for dungeons and PvP work after launch, with PvP matchmaking weighting server progress and PvP strength. There will be two auction houses, a per-server market and a regional cross-server market, both trading in Kina, the currency you earn by playing. The cross-server one opens later still, once servers reach what NC calls "a similar stage in the game".
None of the three tiers includes subscription time or associated benefits, and that omission is deliberate, because Aion 2 has a subscription. The monetization plan NC published on July 8, 2026 pairs the free-to-play base game with an optional $15 subscription, a battle pass and a cash shop. The founder's pack sits on top of all of it and buys days, not benefits.
Aion 2 is free-to-play, PC only, built on Unreal Engine 5, developed and published by NC, with a Steam release window of September 2026. Steam bills it as an MMORPG "where the sky is the battlefield", where players ascend as Daeva and fight a faction war across a world 36 times larger than the original Aion's.
The Details
Everything NC has put on the record, from the price list to the server split.
July 8, 2026
The whole model goes public
Free-to-play base, an optional $15 subscription, a battle pass and a cash shop.
July 22, 2026
Founder's packs go on sale
Three tiers from $24.99 to $99.99, every one of them carrying the same five days.
September 30, 2026
Advance Access opens
Pack buyers get onto the early access servers. Everyone else waits.
September 2026
Steam release window
The launch servers open when the game goes free-to-play.
- NC put the AION 2 Founder's Pack on sale on July 22, 2026 in three tiers: $24.99 Standard, $49.99 Deluxe, $99.99 Ultimate, read directly off the official Steam listing.
- Every tier includes '5-Day Advanced Access'. The Steam store page lists Advance Access as starting September 30, 2026, and describes it as playing 'the game starting 5 days ahead of full release'.
- Standard includes a Daeva's Campaign Supply Chest (Bound) and the Unique-grade title 'Vanguard of Atreia'.
- Deluxe adds the 'Ascended Daeva' armor skin set and the 'Eternal Sun' weapon skin.
- Ultimate adds a Daeva's Styling Chest, the 'Moonlit Aria' armor skin, a Black Dragon pet and Blazing Sun Wings.
- No founder's pack tier includes subscription time or associated benefits.
- NCsoft's early-access notice sets out two server types: early access servers for pre-buyers, and launch servers that open when the game goes free-to-play.
- Players without a founder's pack can still enter an early access server if space is available, and NCsoft says it will consider server transfers after evaluating populations and congestion.
- Cross-server friends lists and cross-server queues for dungeons and PvP will work after launch, and PvP matchmaking will take server progress and PvP strength into account.
- There will be two auction houses: a server market for same-server trade and a regional cross-server market, both using the gameplay-earnable Kina currency. The cross-server market opens later, once servers have reached 'a similar stage in the game'.
- Aion 2 is free-to-play, PC only, built on Unreal Engine 5, developed and published by NC, with a Steam release window of September 2026.
- Steam's own description bills Aion 2 as an MMORPG 'where the sky is the battlefield', with players ascending as Daeva to fight a faction war across a world 36 times larger than the original's.
- Aion 2's monetization plan, published July 8, 2026, pairs the free-to-play base game with an optional $15 subscription, a battle pass, a cash shop and the founder's packs.
What This Means for the Riot MMO
Riot has said nothing about how its MMO is sold. NC just published the whole stack, and one item on it decides who gets the world first.
Riot has never put a business model on the record for its MMO. Not a price, not a subscription, not a cash shop, not a founder's pack. So the useful part of Aion 2 is not the price list. It is that NC has published the entire modern stack in public, months ahead of launch, and one item on that stack is a decision about the world rather than about the wallet.
A cosmetic sold early costs nobody anything. Five days of access to a live world is a different object, because a world keeps score. The first guilds form in those days. The first territory gets claimed. The first economy opens with a fixed number of hands in it. Whoever is standing there on day one writes the history everyone else arrives into.
In Aion 2 that history gets written on servers a free player may not be able to reach, and the repair for the split lands after the split. Cross-server queues and the regional auction house both come later, once NC decides the servers are close enough in progress.
Whoever is standing there on day one writes the history everyone else arrives into.
The economy half of this already has a recent precedent, and it was not a big-budget launch. Our coverage of a $15 indie MMO that pulled 20,000 players in its launch week and then switched off trading to save its own economy is what one population on one set of rules did to itself. Aion 2 is opening two populations on different days and letting them trade through a market that shows up late.
The pack itself is worth reading as a category, not a price. We have already covered a classic MMO that halved players' backpack space in beta and sold the other half back through a cash shop, which is the same move made after launch instead of before it. A founder's pack is politer, because nothing gets taken away. It just gets given out early to the people who paid.
The old complaint that every MMO since WoW feels the same usually points at combat and questing. Monetization has converged just as hard. Free-to-play base, optional subscription, battle pass, cash shop, paid head start on separate servers. Aion 2 has all five and published them before shipping a single day of the game.
| Aion 2 | The Riot MMO | |
|---|---|---|
| Business model | Free-to-play, plus an optional $15 subscription, a battle pass and a cash shop | Not revealed |
| Paid head start | $24.99 to $99.99, all tiers carrying the same five days | Not revealed |
| Where the first days happen | Early access servers, opened before the free launch servers | Not revealed |
| Moving between them | NCsoft will "consider" transfers after evaluating populations and congestion | Not revealed |
| Platform | PC only, Unreal Engine 5 | Not revealed |
| World | Atreia, billed at 36 times the size of the original Aion's | Runeterra. That is the whole confirmed list. |
- A paid head start splits a population before a free-to-play MMO is even free, and in a world with a faction war in it, that split decides who holds ground on day one.
- Charging $24.99 to $99.99 for days plus skins while including zero subscription time separates "get in early" and "stay subscribed" into two products sold to the same person.
- The two-server structure creates a transfer problem NCsoft has already hedged on, and hedged in public, before anyone has bought in.
- Cross-server queues and a cross-server auction house are the patch for a fragmented launch, and both land after the fragmenting rather than with it.
- Riot's silence on its own business model gets louder every time a direct competitor publishes a full monetization plan months ahead of launch.
Here is where RuneGrove has to be honest about its own subject. The only confirmed fact about Riot's MMO is that it is set in Runeterra. Which regions it opens in, how much of the world you can walk, what era it takes place in, what it runs on and how it is sold are all unrevealed. The map below and the crests under it are the fiction Riot draws on, browsable in the Atlas. They are not a starting zone, and nobody outside Riot knows what is.
What that fiction does have is a great deal of contested ground. Noxus has spent its canon taking things. Ionia has spent its canon getting them taken. Demacia built a whole national identity out of the argument. In a world where "who got here first" is already the plot, selling the answer for $24.99 is not a small design choice.
Riot has animated that question before, and it is still the clearest version of it. Awaken, the Season 2019 cinematic, is three minutes of everybody deciding to show up at once. 
Draven flips an axe in a Noxian hall while the war gets packed for. A whole Ionian village walks out onto one road behind 
Irelia. 
Swain tears the sky open at the end of it. Nobody in that cinematic bought their way onto the field early. They are there because the story put them there.
That is the difference worth holding while Riot stays quiet. NC is selling position in a world that does not exist yet, and it has told everyone the terms. Riot has told us the setting and nothing else, which means the day-one question is entirely open: unrevealed, not answered quietly in a store listing.
What To Watch
Two dated beats left on the Aion 2 calendar, and the coverage this piece argues with.
Your Take
If Riot's MMO sold a paid five-day head start on separate servers, would you buy it?
Reported from NC (official Steam store listing) and corroborating coverage. The MMO read is ours and clearly speculative. Analysis by RuneGrove.
