BioWare: Old Republic's Free-to-Play Success Is Uncertain

[AzrealMaximillion]

Every patch that didn't include anything for endgame play was a nail in the coffin. Free to play or not, when you're done your story there is nothing to do but PvP still, and that is disgusting.

 

[Starke]

... but even in hindsight it's hard to find people who expected the game would fail so quickly.

This might sound stupid, but that's a joke... right?

Yeah, I am not sure where they got that. It seems like the game journalists have too much of a love affair with BW and don't see what us regular folks are seeing.

Having been in beta, the doom and gloomers were in full force at least 3 months prior to launch and have continued unabated since. Of course they were labeled "haterz" by the "fanbois" but there were definitely plenty of people who expected it to fail this badly.

Well, it can't have been from these forums, because I was calling the game doomed back in November on here... The thing I remember from beta was any time anyone raised an issue the rabid fan cadre would start pointing and screaming "hater", so it kinda set the environment for failure there...

I just recently started playing, and being a former wow player I am impressed with this game. Yeah there are alot of annoying aspects but wow also has some as well. I don't get why people compare all mmos to wow. Everquest was an MMO last I checked, wow just refined it. I do like SWTOR and I'm sad to see it is not a huge success. Bioware needs to hurry up and fix this.

To be fair the game itself would be a success by any other company; the issue is that the dev price of the game was so high that it needed to grab an audience size not even WoW could initially get and hang onto it. It was an impossible scenario.

I vaguely remember two parallel descriptions of the game at launch. First that it was the fastest selling MMO of all time, and second that it was failing to meet expectations. And while the former could have been just more marketing bullshit, I'm kinda inclined to believe that both statements were true, leading to the hilarious scenario you're talking about.

Personally I think TOR will stick around for a while, and while I don't think the FTP model will work as well for them as games specifically designed for it... they have some time to tweak it. If TOR works in the F2P market, it pretty much sets a standard that any MMO of any size will work in that market. I'm of the opinion that the game itself should never be free; there's enough content as a single player game that you could charge $20 for it and be okay.

The thing on numbers tends to be with F2P... well, let me start over, with most MMOs you get a sharp spike at launch, a fast drop within the first 60-90 days, followed by a slow dribbling away of players. F2P games run a fairly similar trend, but the initial drop is somewhat gentler, and the loss of players after that tends to be about 1/2 to 1/3 as steep.

This might actually be what the Bioware rep was talking about, btw. Going F2P is kinda like rolling the dice again and getting a fresh start, at that point they're still going to lose players, the best they can hope for is the players stick around for three times as long, but given the catestrophic falloff in numbers, that might not be long enough for them to make money.

People want to play this for the story, treat it as KOTOR 3+... well, give it to them for cheap and have people pay more for the MMO side of it. Play it online but limit groups, guilds, operative, heroics, and crafting as things you can temporarily or permanently add to the experience with funds. It's very similar to what they're planning, but I personally thing the software itself could still be sold stand-alone.

Honestly, marketing Bioware games on their story... ugh... okay, so it says more about what a terrible state the industry is in from a writing standpoint, but... to get the numbers Bioware wanted from the game, they had to have mass market appeal. When we're in the game industry, looking at Bioware, they have a lot of fans who flock to them saying "this is the best storytelling out there" or something similar. The problem is, it's really not.

So in the normal Bioware fandom, they have people who will flock for their story, and that's fine, but they then made their story a barrier for anyone else who wanted to play the game, and anyone in the general market it looks like the train wreck it is.

 

[ms_sunlight]

My own personal theory is that EA always knew they'd likely have to go F2P within a year. The age of the subscription MMO is over; the only ones still successful on a subscription model are years old with established player bases like WoW and Eve. So, it's boxed retail release (with various premium editions) to gouge everyone who'll buy anything with the names "Star Wars" or "BioWare" on it, then a subscription period to gouge everyone who'll subscribe, then F2P to get everyone else.

I actually like SWTOR quite a lot, and I'd recommend that anyone who liked KotOR give it a crack when it goes F2P. Some of the class stories are really solid; in particular, the Imperial Agent and Smuggler storylines stand out for me but all of them are enjoyable. Is it a perfect game? No. Is it worth playing? Definitely. I'm hoping it will see a resurgence under F2P because there's a lot going for it.

 

[Jadak]

Don't know how to feel, I'm looking forward to playing it some more because I want to finish some of the storyline, but after that first month I still wouldn't pay for it again.

Should have been Kotor 3, I guess is how I feel, still.

 

[Thoric485]

I'd just like to remind about this lovely snippet

"[WoW] has established standards, it's established how you play an MMO. Every MMO that comes out, I play and look at it. And if they break any of the WoW rules, in my book that's pretty dumb."

This is the misguided philosophy that doomed WAR, AoC and now SWTOR. Hopefully TESO will be the last one in this string of pathetic failures and the MMO genre will start moving forward again.

 

[YodaUnleashed]

I guess when they started developing the Old Republic the MMO industry was a different place, adapt and survive.

 

[SomebodyNowhere]

I enjoyed my time playing my trial up to lvl 15 so I'll probably give it a go when it turns to f2p, but I can't really say that I expect to spend any money on it.

 

[Canadish]

BioWare: Old Republic's Free-to-Play Success Is Uncertain

...but even in hindsight it's hard to find people who expected the game would fail so quickly.

You guys serious? I'm guessing you didn't read anything other then the marketing teams drivel and otherwise avoided the internet for 6 months?

But, seriously now...

The schadenfreude from watching this ship sink has been...delicious.

Spoiler

S.S.TORtantic 2011-2012.

 

[MagmaMan]

I will never play a subscription based game. Xbox Live I think kind of pushes it. I think it's worth it to pay for all my games, but paying a subscription to have full access to ONE game? No, just... no.

 

[TheDrunkNinja]

I tend to hop around games. I generally play games based on what I feel like playing. I know that's technically what everyone who owns games do, but for me, it's more finite than that. If I don't feel like a space adventure, I won't play Mass Effect, I can't. If I'm feeling particularly medieval, I can only play Skyrim or Dragon Age.

The subscription based payment was costing me money, since I don't always feel like playing Star Wars, but constantly freezing and unfreezing my account was just ridiculous. I just didn't have the money to keep the subscription going despite playing when it suits me.

A free-to-play model will absolutely get me back as a player, because you only pay if you play, which I will be doing. I'm happy to fork over money to make my bounty hunter the most badass in this well-crafted galaxy, but only when I'm playing it, which won't be all the time.

 

[Argtee]

I'm sure they would have made WAY more money if they had just made KOTOR 3.

 

[Baresark]

Damn strait there is no way of knowing. The game isn't a bad game, but in a lot of ways it's just another game. I thought that if it were successful, it would be mostly because of the name on the box, not because it was an outstanding game. When push came to shove, it's not special enough.

Last year, Star Wars: The Old Republic was in a prime position to knock World of Warcraft down a peg or two.

This was never actually the case. It was never in that good of position to knock the game down. It could never offer the experience that can out due the "sunk cost" fallacy. If you give players the same game, they are going to revert to the one they already have the most time invested in. It's just a given of economics. The only way it could have surpassed it was if WoW was declined enough already, which it was not. Also, the streams of content were fucking weak. I'm completely positive that is how RIFT has survived as long as it has. Just constantly streaming new content. I'm even looking forward to getting my hands on that expansion.

I also don't feel that the game will be that successful as F2P. When it's free, there is even less reason to skip out on the game that you pay monthly for.

 

[mgs16925]

I've tried and failed to get into this game a few times now. The actual story parts are good but they're so spread out it starts to seem like a chore to slog through the boring combat and see them. You could get through both of the first two games with every sidequest in less time than it takes to get through the first act of any character in this one, and the mmo will have gone through about as much story as they do in two hours.

The mmo parts slow the story to a crawl while the story just highlights how repetitive the combat is and takes you out of your skinner box trance, that is why this game fails. How anyone suffered through it to even find out about the week endgame content is beyond me. The free to play option strips out eveything that made the game even remotely bearable or original, it even cripples character creation. I really wonder why they think that will help.

 

[crazyrabbits]

I'm sure they would have made WAY more money if they had just made KOTOR 3.

I think this whole experience was just indicative of EA's philosophy as a whole: follow the leader, no matter how many developers/employees or series you have to sacrifice to get the job done.

There was a great video I watched on Youtube about TOR going free-to-play a couple months back. In that video, the author used the testimony of another videomaker to explain how the game had faltered so badly: EA wanted to rush it to shelves to compete with WOW, even after the subscription model was clearly shown to be failing for most other MMO developers.

From what I remember, the head of EA's Games Division at the time (2007) licenced the source engine for the game (HeroEngine), which said division head supposedly begged the designers for, even though it was nowhere near "shippable" status, and was basically an incomplete engine. Yet, they forged on anyway because they wanted the game out for a release date, and they supposedly assumed it would sell just because of the brand name.

The video then went on to state that the incomplete engine forced the game designers to use workarounds and guesses, and by the time the game was finalized and ready to ship, the final HeroEngine was just being released for developer use. As a result, the game was (and still is) a buggy mess that will often crash if you try to change your graphics settings, and was full of texture and map holes, buggy animations and wonky scripting.

Basically, everyone assumed that because so much money had been spent on it, it couldn't fail. It's essentially becoming the Superman Returns of video games. I'm willing to bet that the upcoming WOW patch/expansion will blow any hope TOR has of bringing back its subscriber base clean out of the water.

 

[TrevHead]

Maybe the reason it failed is because the large chunk of ppl interested in playing are KOTOR fans and most of those ppl have already played it and have moved on.

I personally haven't played it, MMOs are to big a timesink and if I wanted to play a mmo i'ld go back to Eve.

 

[A-D.]

The irony of it all is, well of the "nobody expected it to fail" statement, i knew it would fail the moment it was announced that Bioware is developing it. Because lets face it, Bioware is good at Singleplayer and Story, that stuff usually doesnt really mesh that well with the MMO aspect, also Bioware had no prior experience with a MMO to begin with. Now granted you could have made the same arguement with WoW, Blizz being not familiar with MMOs either but..well it was a RTS they adapted and owned the whole world and lore of, and they got really lucky on top of it.

Fact is, something had to drop to the wayside at any case after all the moment they even started, either the story would suck, the presentation or the gameplay. Still i was somewhat open to being proven wrong, until they announced the backstory, which is when i threw my hands up and said "fuck it, im out". Yes, that one line "The Sith are in it" made me leave the whole sinking ship, tho not blaming bioware as much, rather lucasarts for fucking up the lore again.

The "We used WoW as inspiration" was essentially the final nail in the coffin, so i expect any fan, either of Bioware or Star Wars in general probably saw the "failure" coming ahead of time, then again it lasted longer than APB, which nobody saw coming..but that was the Dev pissing the money away.

 

[Terrible Opinions]

I just wanted KotOR 3.

God dammit, guys.

 

[zacattack14]

I'm actually really sad this game is such a massive failure, like this is studio closing failure. I feel really bad for the guys at Bioware Austin, because there was really no way this game was going to succeed on the level it needed to.