Scott Hartsman recently spoke with Eurogamer where he discussed the business of subscribers and money.

“Let me think,” Rift executive producer Scott Hartsman told Eurogamer. “Rift has been holding – yeah, it’s definitely been growing since launch, for sure.”

“Subscribers?” he asked, when asked.

“One of the great things about our business is that we really don’t need to worry so much about making noise about overall subscriber numbers. We are pretty damn happy that we have a healthy business and a successful game. And players, thousands of people who pick up the game, continue to.”

When pressed if he could share a specific subscriber number, Hartsman answered, “Not at this time.”

Which is in keeping with Trion’s behaviour since Rift launched. Never have we been told subscriber numbers and, with Trion being a private company, we can’t rely on financial reports to dish the dirt.

As the article mentions, we’ve never heard of subscriber numbers from Trion, only that we had 1 million account registered some time ago. Scott goes on to discuss the pros and cons of free-to-play models that seem to be popular these days and how that would effect Rift. He also discusses how to measure the metrics of free to play users and month to month subscribers.

Make sure to read the whole interview.

The buzz is building up and the Rift-PR staff is at full go. With beta right around the corner (it has to be really soon right?) we are seeing more and more articles and impressions of Rift popping up. Today we have two media pieces done by Eurogamer. The first is a hand-on impression of the game. Nothing new or exciting for the veteran Rift fan, but it’s always nice to see someone’s impression of the latest internal build.

Eurogamer hands on:

Among the dispiriting number of titles released to face Goliath, stand their own ground and give something back to an audience craving innovation rather than re-iteration, Rift is a refreshingly complete game offering enough new experiences to make it worthy of close attention. In the battle of the heavyweights, Trion’s first venture into MMOs may turn out to be the sucker-punch nobody saw coming.