Star Wars: The Old Republic - Free to Play up to Level 50 this Fall
#1
Tue, 07/31/2012 - 20:46
Star Wars: The Old Republic - Free to Play up to Level 50 this Fall
Things are not going well in the house of Bioware.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ea-expands-award-winning-mmo-star-warst...
For some reason this doesn't surprise me.
I don't know if f2p means there are issues or if EA is looking to squeeze more money out of the fan base. If they start shutting down servers, then I would say there are problems.
WoW may be long in the tooth, but apparently even a franchise like Star Wars can't seem to generate the numbers needed to compete long term.
The last I had heard was that WoW had dropped to 10 million active subscribers. Most MMO's haven't ever peaked at that number, I don't think.
MMO games need to have a lot of long term content. You need to keep people playing for years and years. Look at Everquest and FFXI. Both came out on the PS2 and the latter would run on dial up smoothly. People still play them.
Not too srprised that this is going to be the case. I played SWTOR for 6 months from launch, and I just got bored with it. There wasn't much to do once you hit the level cap but grind dailies, and I could never find people to run instances with. I was trying to experience every flashpoint the game had to offer, but found that there were a few FPs that no one would ever want to run.
Rerolling a new class got old when you started doing all the same quests over again outside of your main storyline. The foundations for something great were there, I just feel that it never really lived up to its potential.