[vaelic]

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/04/23/bi...g-in-to-swtor/

game over?

[Raide]

F2P in 3....2...1...

[YuriLowell]

They will adopt the wow model soon.
F2P until level 20.

[MrHicks]

mmo devs need to realize that unless you are incredibly different from WOW and can carve out your own niche

eve for example

then you shouldn't bother

[Stahsky]

I did not have a lot of fun playing this game

[Synth_floyd]

Why don't they just make it a fun game?

[RPGCrazied]

F2P in 3....2...1...

Please? I'd play if it became this. I can't pay for more than one MMO right now, but I do want to play it though.

[FyreWulff]

he demands of building a fully-voiced MMO means that new missions and planets have to be planned far in advance – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that BioWare can’t change tack if the community demands it. “We’re getting spryer all the time” Erickson explains “usually it’s a question of priority and since we have separate teams working on different initiatives we can usually change priorities for a particular game update fairly easily.”

"Let's take a game that needs fast and steady content updates at launch and make it really expensive and slow to actually add content because we've got a hard on for full voicing"

[Pollux]

Make it playable for Mac. Bc I want to play.

[Pie Lord]

I'm honestly starting to worry about the future of Bioware.

[Kintaro]

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/04/23/bi...g-in-to-swtor/ game over?

Game over?

BioWare claim that subscriber numbers haven’t dropped, but concurrent users at peak times have. This, Erickson says, is the reason why players are noticing a lot of ‘light’ server populations – and also why mergers are on the cards, but not a priority. According to Erickson, they’re doing “anything and everything” to bring that concurrent users number up. “Nothing is off the table when it comes to making sure our communities are strong and active on each server.”

Selective quoting?

[subversus]

game over?

have you read the article? I have read it and I can't see how you came to this conclusion.

[DTKT]

Not really. They are trying to engage the player base. Nothing bad with that.

[magenta]

So it is tanking? Will Bioware have some serious 're-structuring' as a result?

[DoctorWho]

I did not have a lot of fun playing this game

I did for a month.

I've come to terms with the fact that the only MMO's I like are fantasy based ones. Even then, I probably won't play them for more than a couple of months.

[vaelic]

Game over? Selective quoting?

please. it's called SPIN

[subversus]

So it is tanking? Will Bioware have some serious 're-structuring' as a result?

I think it's a matter of time. They had 2 games in a row which dissapointed their core fanbase and they failed to to widen their audience enough to stop caring about their core fans.

[1-D_FTW]

Game over? Selective quoting?

It's not really selective. Going by that other thread, they basically gave a free month subscription to anyone who remotely played the game. So while it stemmed the tide of cancellations to another fiscal quarter, the fact those gamers aren't actually logging in and playing means when that freebie expires, there's a good chance they will cancel it.

[SUPARSTARX]

This game wasn't fun in beta. They should spent more budgeting and planning for real content, not voice acting.

[Tobor]

I'm never paying a subscription for an MMO again. F2P is superior in every way. I can wait, Bioware.

[darkwing]

they should F2P it while the interest is high

[Jibbed]

If it looked and felt like Star Wars in the first place, then they wouldn't have player count issues.

[DoctorWho]

If it looked and felt like Star Wars in the first place, then they wouldn't have player count issues.

It looks and feels exactly like Star Wars from the perspective of some bloke carrying out a bunch of tasks and collecting rewards.

[sillymonkey321]

i'll definitely try it, if my laptop can even run it, when it's F2P...but i don't pay monthly fees for games anymore.

[ScreenSplitter]

Should've made KOTOR 3 fool.

[Quadratic]

I liked it for the month I played but having a huge console backlog and the time you need to invest in a MMO has kept me away. I got my Imperial Agent to 50 and I felt satisfied.

[Fudgepuppy]

I think it's a matter of time. They had 2 games in a row which dissapointed their core fanbase and they failed to to widen their audience enough to stop caring about their core fans.

Mass Effect 3 nor Dragon Age 2 were commercial failures.

[ultron87]

They should just put the actual boxed game on sale for a nice low price like 20 bucks. It seems to be on sale in places for 40 right now, so they are halfway there. People just don't want to pay 60 bucks for one month of an MMO anymore.

[Darklord]

I got an email saying if I log back in I get an entire month for free. lol, they fucked up. The game does have some awesome moments but they are spread over 200 hours and in the end, it ends up being better than WoW at some things, worse at others, and that's not enough.

They shouldn't have copied WoW. They should have gone for something else.

Mass Effect 3 nor Dragon Age 2 were commercial failures.

Dragon Age 2 sold like shit.

[wienke]

I don't exactly remember a huge wealth of content in WoW this far into release other than dying a million times in Molten Core with 39 other people.

I suppose it wasn't as huge of a problem back when because WoW was a lot of people's first MMO of this style so people were still learning. WoW definitely has a significant competitive advantage having 7 years of tweaks, patches, and expansions for content.

[Enosh]

[Dysun]

Should've made KOTOR 3 fool.

This

Game crashes and burns at 50 when the class story line ends. Could have just made a great single player or limited coop game

[Deadly Cyclone]

I did not have a lot of fun playing this game

Why don't they just make it a fun game?

I had a lot of fun playing. Too much came out at the same time though.

[Kintaro]

Curious on those who are calling for F2P. Why exactly? What F2P MMOs do you currently play? How much do you buy from them? Do you buy anything? How many are you playing at once? Any? How much content to you continue to expect when a game goes F2P?

[Elginer]

Will try when it becomes F2P. Love Star Wars but from all of my friends who picked this up they've already grown tired of it and moved on back to WoW or something else.

[VindictiveGnome]

I enjoyed the game on a free weekend a few weeks back. Every five minutes I asked myself, "Why is this a MMO?!" The game would make more sense as a singleplayer game. So, I will never buy it. Not worth it to me.

[Hari Seldon]

It doesn't really make sense to play the game once you finish it at 50. This is truly an MMO that you finish. Everything after the story line is simply for loot grinders. Bleh on that shit. Loot grinding is so 2006.

[Dalauz]

Bioware response:

It’s important to BioWare that the Rakghoul plague is a one-off. “Events are, by their very nature, transient things that build a sense of history within the game” Erickson explains. “Later you’ll pull out your red rakling pet and say, ‘remember when the rakghoul plague hit.’”

"Pets/Vanity Items."

[Moaradin]

Not gonna go f2p anytime soon.

[AppleMIX]

Oh boy this thread again.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/04...now-declining/

Gamasutra reports on one such forecast for Star Wars: The Old Republic by Cowen and Company. Analyst Doug Creutz says that though TOR's subs peaked at 1.7 million in February, he expects them to drop to around 1.25 million by March of 2013.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news...h-500-000-Subs

"At half a million subscribers, the game is substantially profitable, but it's not the kind of thing we would write home about," he said. "Anything north of a million subscribers, it's a very profitable business."

The only problem is that they launched too many severs (because people were demanding them). They just need to merge severs and everything will be fine.

[Hari Seldon]

Curious on those who are calling for F2P. Why exactly? What F2P MMOs do you currently play? How much do you buy from them? Do you buy anything? How many are you playing at once? Any? How much content to you continue to expect when a game goes F2P?

This game doesn't even need to be F2P. You can max a character in a month and never pay a subscription. You have seen all that is worth seeing and spent a lot more hours than any normal single player game doing it.

[kingkaiser]

“anything and everything” so, does this mean there will be ingame romances with wookiees and ewoks available soon?

[Tobor]

Curious on those who are calling for F2P. Why exactly? What F2P MMOs do you currently play? How much do you buy from them? Do you buy anything? How many are you playing at once? Any? How much content to you continue to expect when a game goes F2P?

I'm playing Star Trek Online off and on. I've spent around $40 in real money total, and I dont feel that obligation to play in order to justify the subscription. I can stop playing for a month and sign back in, no worries. Or just quit and not have to worry about canceling.

EDIT: Most importantly, I can download and try the game for free to see if I'll like it, then pay what I want to have the experience I want.

[Divvy]

It looks and feels exactly like Star Wars from the perspective of some bloke carrying out a bunch of tasks and collecting rewards.

Before I played TOR I didn't realize Star Wars had so much magic in it. It's basically a WoW clone with a SW skin.

[BigDes]

Honestly one of the worst mistakes they did with this game was with the amount of servers they made available.

There were far too many

[Orayn]

Sounds like Bioware and EA are starting to get desperate.



Your turn.

[Effect]

Offering less then Star Wars Galaxies was a mistake I think. It's fair that the two are compared I think. There were reasons why that game died and they are known. Trying to be like WoW was a big one and Bioware jumped into that side of the pool head first from day one. However without a good number of things that WoW did well. Not even the soloing progression is as good. It's actually worse and less entertaining. Challenging encounters (Strong and Elites) should be there for groups, not soloing. That's part the point of being able to solo.

My issue with the game, something I felt even before buying (only because I found it cheap), is that this really was a single player game that they tried to stretch into a MMO and it doesn't work, at least after a while.

I'm not surprised at all if subs are dropping quickly. Between design and them launching with to many servers and then refusing to merge them after many that bought the game didn't stay after the free month (always happens) thus giving those on those servers more reason not to play this was alway going to happen.

I like the era TOR takes place in. The problem is that I don't think it lends itself well to a MMO game. Single player RPGs...yes. That is why Knights of the Old Republic worked out well. It was more focused. SWG worked because there was so much to pull from. There were settings and characters (not just the aliens races) that were easily recognizable if you watched the movies or even read the books and comics or played the other games that came out around the time. The Sith Empire era is still being built and isn't as well known and I doubt it ever will be. There is less of a Star Wars feel to it because it isn't the Star Wars people are familiar with once you get past the visual layer.

[subversus]

Mass Effect 3 nor Dragon Age 2 were commercial failures.

Dragon Age II was a commercial failure and jeopardized the future of the franchise. It sold less than DA:O, they cancelled the expansion which was already announced and they cancelled the ultimate edition (which DA:O had btw) because "retailers had no interest".

Mass Effect 3 pissed a lot of people by its ending and this is at least half of its audience. 54% of players imported their saves from ME1 in the first three days after ME2 release and the game had slightly higher completion rates. That means that all these people have completed ME2, imported their saves in ME3 and most likely completed it. According to various surveys more than 80% are dissapointed in ME3 ending. The game also had face import bug for a month. More than 83% of people made custom Shepard. So there are a lot of pissed customers. And this might affect future sales.

[Kintaro]

This game doesn't even need to be F2P. You can max a character in a month and never pay a subscription. You have seen all that is worth seeing and spent a lot more hours than any normal single player game doing it.

WTF? Welcome to MMOs!

[fizzelopeguss]

I'm playing Star Trek Online off and on. I've spent around $40 in real money total, and I dont feel that obligation to play in order to justify the subscription. I can stop playing for a month and sign back in, no worries. Or just quit and not have to worry about canceling. EDIT: Most importantly, I can download and try the game for free to see if I'll like it, then pay what I want to have the experience I want.

I'm the same, but with world of tanks.