MrMan999 said:
So, How long until Bioware goes the way of Origin, Maxis, Westwood and Bullfrog?
With the TORtanic rapidly taking on water, they're on borrowed time.
But, all jokes aside, they're not in good shape. TOR has failed to meet expectations, and is rapidly sinking. It was also the fastest selling MMO in history, so it seems those expectations weren't exactly reasonable, but at the same time their retention was so bad: they had to resort to using incentives and hiding the cancel subscription button.
And while I'm not too inclined to put too much stock in it, I keep hearing that PvP is now worse than ever, and for an MMO that's a major chunk of it's population, and in the case of TOR,
PvP is their endgame content, basically. And every time I've looked in on TOR since the open betas, I've seen nothing but waves of nearly empty servers.
Mass Effect 3 made money, but not the kind of money they were looking for, otherwise they wouldn't have been coughing up free DLC for it, and they wouldn't have loaded in all those double XP weekends at launch. The backlash for ME3 has been so bad there hasn't been any paid DLC yet, with the exception of the day 0 stuff.
Dragon Age 2 apparently did well, but also failed to live up to expectations, and I kinda suspect the tail for it has been terrible, as they've gone back and canceled all subsequent DLC releases for it.
That leaves us with, what?
They're not talking about doing another Mass Effect game yet, and E3 would have been the place to do that, even if it's just a teaser to get people talking. They've talked about DA3, but that's been very vague. And we're hearing now that TOR will be celebrating it's first anniversary by going F2P. Making it about half as successful as Star Trek Online in that regard.
I'm going to take out my crystal ball and say 18 months to two years. But as a name, I think it's going to be slapped on TOR and kept there indefinitely, until the MMO closes, sorta like how EA keeps slapping the Westwood name on every C&C game that rolls to market. How long will TOR last as a F2P MMO? I've no idea, probably years if EA can find a way to make it profitable.