Did Ineffective Monetization Kill Star Wars: The Old Republic?

[RandV80]

Maybe my opinion isn't common enough that it would make a difference, being a non-mmo player and having played the game in question, but it seems pretty obvious to me. if you want to distinguish yourself from WoW (or at least top it), and you're using the Star Wars IP... then where the hell is the epic space combat? If you look at Star Wars as a whole, the first thing anybody wants to be is a Jedi. The second is to zip around in X-wing fighters and blow up TIE fighters (or the other way around). Before we had the tech to effectively create a game that lets you be a Jedi, Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance were the most iconic Star Wars video games available.

I know it would be a bit more work to implement, but a space sim generally isn't going to be expensive to make these days, and they had a whopping $200m budget. Couldn't have been that much more work to upgrade their half assed on-rails space shooter to legitimate space sim quality, and it could make for some great end game content.

Again I don't know what the numbers behind this would be, but that's what would've gotten me interested in the game.

 

[Starke]

star trek online has the same issue. you can zoom through the content in about 2/3 weeks tops and then there is pretty much nothing to do other than grind gear for the sake of grinding gear and thats with the new starbases too

Star Trek's actually worse, there were people in Sovereigns back in the first week the game came out, and you could easily get to RA5 (the original level cap) within a couple days.

IIRC, for a new player, there was about 100 hours of content fed side at launch, including patrols.


The last two years have added... well, honestly not that much more, about 40 hours on top?

 

[Lord Beautiful]

Subscription models are like the Highlander.
THERE CAN ONLY BE OOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNE!

"Be" goes before "only."

*le snip*

You make a lot of sense, sir.

 

[Nielas]

If you read the entire article, he actually points to the lack of community and community tools as a key weakness of the game. A subscription MMORPG needs good community aspects if it wants longevity.

 

[Xanthious]

What turned me off personally was the lack of a decent Looking for Group tool upon launch. Standing around a city doing nothing for a significant portion of your game time is not something I'm willing to pay a monthly fee for. I hear they have since implimented one but it's too little too late. I might go back and check it out once it goes free to play but that will largely depend on how entertained I am by Mists of Pandaria.

 

[Exterminas]

Did Ineffective Monetization Kill Star Wars: The Old Republic?

Short answer: No
Long answer: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

In all seriousnes, though. The game failed, because it was unpolished and had glaring design-flaws that a six-year-old could have pointed out.

(Example: One strictly linear levelling path per faction while on the same time pourring ressources and creativity into good class-specific questlines. Thus forcing people who want to see the good bits to go through every damn quest over and over, and over again)

 

[Mind2Matter]

When this first came out, I was seriously considering switching from WoW to ToR, because it was being trumpeted as 100x better than WoW. I then decided to watch my friends play it before I made my decision, and I noticed that it was EXACTLY the same. Still had the useless gather quests, still had the leet mobs that would tear your face off, it was simply a WoW clone that was strong with the force.

Now that it's going f2p, I again considered giving it a shot until I noticed that it limits your character development by forcing you to take select races. This would be like WoW saying, "All you free members, we're going to limit you to just the human and orc races. You can unlock the rest with a subscription." If WoW had been like that, I wouldn't have gone to subscription and I wouldn't have played it. A good f2p/freemium should limit activity, not creation.

 

[Fr]anc[is]

Now that it's going f2p, I again considered giving it a shot until I noticed that it limits your character development by forcing you to take select races. This would be like WoW saying, "All you free members, we're going to limit you to just the human and orc races. You can unlock the rest with a subscription." If WoW had been like that, I wouldn't have gone to subscription and I wouldn't have played it. A good f2p/freemium should limit activity, not creation.

Race is as far as I can tell purely cosmetic, and even then they're all just different colors of human/humans with various things taped to their heads.

 

[Hal10k]

I'm pretty sure what killed TOR is the fact that they spent $500 million to develop an MMO with barely a month's worth of content and no incentive for continued play.

 

[The Lunatic]

Seems unlikely, I think it's more likely the fact the game wasn't very good and had little content was likely to blame for players not liking it.

 

[Faladorian]

It did the EXACT SAME FUCKING THING THAT EVERY BIOWAREA GAME DOES.


EA assumes that if you can get the overlap of a venn diagram, you can get both circles.
No.

SPRPG players do not want to play an MMO.
MMO players to not want to play an SPRPG.

There are however people who overlap and will play a very heavily SPRPG influenced MMO.
However there are even more people who wont.

Its not a horrible game, but it did nothing new, and had no end game content.
Same thing with ME becoming a turd party shooter, and Dragon Age becoming an action game.

They are trying to appeal to a broad audience, but end up appealing to very few people.
Added to that they are cheapskates who cut corners and offend those who would like the game.

Its just fail an epic scale.

"SPRPG players do not want to play an MMO"

Yes, I'm looking at you, Borderlands.


OT: TOR was destined to fail. And again, it's a shame that BioWare has to pay for EA's mistakes. I just hope EA takes very soon and doesn't completely obliterate BioWare with it.

 

[Promethax]

Ummm, no.

Nothing killed SWTOR.

As far as I'm concerned, the game is still up and running.

It seems a little soon to do an autopsy on something that isn't quite dead (yet).

If we used the logic that F2P = dead, then WoW (and probably 2 other games) would be the only MMO's,

which is a false statement.

Not sure if jumping the gun, sensationalist journalism, or just plain stupidity.

 

[SomeBrianDude]

My problem with SWTOR was this - it wasn't a good enough multiplayer experience to give me my MMO fix (I'm itchin' for some GW2), and it wasn't a good enough single player experience to make me play it instead of, for example, Fallout or The Witcher.

It tried to be all things to all men, and ended up falling short of all the things it promised. That's the reason I stopped playing, anyway.

 

[geizr]

There seems to be a lot of theory-crafting around the web regarding why SWTOR didn't do so well. Maybe, just maybe, the real reason is because it just wasn't that great of a game.

Personally, I don't think the subscription model is dead; however, I do think that the subscription model will generally fail if a game simply is not good enough. Just about every attempted exodus away from WoW has always seen a resurgence back to WoW and its subscription model. So, I don't think the problem is people being unwilling or unable to pay for the game under the subscription model. I think it's more that they quickly find the content of every other game that has tried to dethrone WoW to be insufficiently compelling to hold their interest, or they find numerous unacceptable gameplay, game-design, and game-mechanical issues that ruin the game for them.

To be fair, at this point, it's almost impossible to unseat WoW. The game has been under constant development, refinement, and expansion for the past 8 years now. It is prohibitive for any new MMO to attain the same level of detail and volume of content upon release that WoW has built over the past 8 years. The idea of the WoW-killer was a potentially viable concept in the first 3-4 years of WoW's existence, but, at this point, the sheer size and scope makes any attempt a virtual futility for any MMO that simply tries to clone WoW's success. In my opinion, it would take a game that radically departs from the current formula, such to be incomparable to WoW, to have any chance. Otherwise, the only things that are ever going to kill WoW are Blizzard and time.

 

[Ryan Hughes]

Any time someone uses the word "monetization" with a straight face, that should clue you in that the person has no idea what they are talking about. The word itself is one of those "power words" that they teach in business school, like "paradigm" and "synergy." The word is a stock joke in English Arts and Literature circles.

In any event, the reason it failed was not because of poor effort on the part of the artistic staff of the game, nor because of mismanagement by BioWare Austin, but rather because the MMO business model itself is unsustainable. I made this point elsewhere, but in summery: there is no way that you can keep revenue levels high enough, even with constant updates and expansions. In trying to meet what MMO developers think are the demands of their players, they invest heavily only to face server depopulation regardless. WoW may be king, but its time will come as well. In fact, I consider the MMO to be a dying genre, populated largely by people I would rather avoid, in real life and even across a game server.

Note: I am still trying to popularize the pronunciation of MMORPG as: "more-pig." I have been unsuccessful so far.

 

[weirdee]

uh

players don't "blast" through a game to save money...

they do it BECAUSE THEY CAN

each game to a player of the highest no-life caliber is an opponent whose only purpose to the couch warrior is to be ground into the dust, a long line of crushing defeat and a stairway to glory

or at least, that's what they do for fun

and swtor wasn't even long enough to satisfy normal players

it wasn't worthy, just like the others...they weren't able to deliver enough regular content to provide any sort of challenge at all, and to drag a story into it was not doing it any favors

face it, this game was better off staying single player, or at the very most, hosted multiplayer

 

[Evil Smurf]

Subscription models are like the Highlander.
THERE CAN BE ONLY OOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNE!

.......A highlander themed MMO! Yes! that would fail so hard

 

[lapan]

It's much simpler. EA and Bioware massively overestimated their customerbase. They made way to many servers while their engine didn't even support server transfers for a long while. That combined with awful support and buggy patches scared their customers away.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

I would prefer the game not go under, maybe release a patch so we can still play the single player content offline? Rework the flashpoints so they can be solo'd. PvP would have to be axed. They put way too much effort in to this game to have it sunk in less than a year.

 

[chadachada123]

The main thing that killed TOR is that it wasn't KotOR3.

We (at least, I) don't want a damn MMO. We want an RPG with possible MMO/multiplayer elements.

If it's going to be an MMO, make it a massively multiplayer shooter-type game that is fast-paced, because that fits far better for the Star Wars universe than an RPG.