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Future of SWTOR
hh33
Member Posts: 55
Everybody has already seen this plenty of times when it comes to MMO's.
1) Massive free game time giveaways and a marketing blitz to go along with it. Every MMO developer that can't sell it's product always hits marketing and free-trials hard, bar none.
2) Deep discounting, various offers with steep discounts towards subs, boxed product and meaningless in-game items. (Summer 2012)
3) Offer the client for free along with a monthly sub. (Fall 2012)
4) F2P with an in-game cash shop. (Winter 2012)
This is SWTOR's future.
Comments
Dude. This is EA. They don't give anything away without squeezing out at least a nickel's worth of blood. Even if it would make sense.
Your missing your calling as a stock broker.
Things are about to get tough for Bioware with D3 only ten days away and GW2 on the distant horizon.
Since the BWE my servers pop has dropped quite significantly at all hours. It seems to me that people have already chosen a new game to replace SWTOR, regardless of how long that might take to see the light of day, and are having a hard time going back to the game after experiencing the BWE.
I know that I have had trouble finding the motivation to login.
I for one am thrilled... i didn't want to pay a monthly sub to endure the pvp mishaps, broken instances, etc... Been waiting on FTP to jump in the land of SWTOR. seems like a kinda coop game i can play with the wife for a bit.
Except of course giving away free time and trials and "come back" weeks like candy, as they have been for TOR.
Make no mistake, they have been throwing everything and the kitchen sink at people to get them to keep playing TOR, and it does not appear to be working.
TOR is looking more and more like a financial turkey as things go on.
And I don't disagree much with the timeline in the OP, except for a longer duration before F2P, because EA needs to work out the new financial model (unless they did that with eventual plans of taking TOR F2P).
In the end, it does not matter much: TOR failed to deliver what most people were looking for.
I completely agree with the both these posts. EA is in this to make money, or at least make the best of an unforeseen situation. There are enough people still subbed (albeit on lots of dead servers) hoping this thing changes its course and that it is possible to recover this game if out of some sudden miracle they start producing like say Trion. But I really think given the already abysmal delivery of promises, SWTOR will eventually get overtaken by the better product choices the market will have in the next 4 months.
I don't however think it will go F2P for a while. They will try promotions (already given away a month), paid server transfers (already announced), additional content, then eventually server mergers, and maybe even free transfers and box giveaways. I just don't think given the Star Wars brand and number of initial subs, they are forced to go F2P for a while. So I wouldn't get your hopes up on that.
My guess is that Lucas Arts will never let them go F2P. My hope is that they allow them to swicth to B2P with a cash shop ala GW2. It will take at least a year for that to happen.
There's no indication that the game is losing money. I'm sure they are still quite profitable. It's just that the suits are getting scared they'll lose their jobs for not maintaining the subs they have and not meeting internal predictions.
I never said it was losing money, per se.
There were however some very definite numbers thrown out by EA/BW execs about what was needed for TOR to be considered "financially successful" by the company and investors.
It was on the order of 1 mil subs for a year, with 500k for a year basically being breaking even.
At this point, I think there is very little chance of EA getting their 1 mil subs for year.
Bottom line is that TOR was the most expensive MMO/computer game ever made and that came with very high exectations for revenue and return on investments.
Everyone but perhaps EA execs realize/admit that meeting those very high expectations is all but impossible at this point: the game was simply not "good enough" for the people that bought it to maintain retention past a month or two, and that is a big problem when you are looking to keep people a year.
Any other MMO generating $100-$150 mil in revenue would be considered a winner. For TOR, that's a loser.
The future for SWTOR is... dark.
My guess is that most of BW/EA are Miraluka, so they won't even see it coming. This would aswell explain alot of their armor-designs.
I think the future of SWTOR is to get lots o leavers due to mmos commming soon... like gw2 archage and so
haha, agreed
I remember people posting at release that SWTOR will have less than 10 servers left after 4 months of release and that game will go F2P with in 6 months. Now i guess doomers have extended their time limit to 2013. In 2013 we will see same posters on new alts, extending doom and gloom to 2014 and F2P or dead servers prediction...and so on.
Its amazing how desperately people want SWTOR to fail even though it is not going to happen.
You must have your eyes closed. Let me open them up for you.
SWTOR has less than 10 active servers left after 4 moths of release. 90% of servers are ghost towns.
The game should be F2P but instead they are just gutting the entire staff and cancelling all future content.
The funniest of it and most cynical :
The dark future of SWTOR just brightened the one of TERA.
I'm sure that if SWTOR wasn't doing so bad in the public eye, TERA wouldn't do so good.
Get some Poetic Justice 4 free :-)
EDIT: I believe that because it is a Star WArs franchise game they have to pay some fee to Lucasart anyway for X time.
Going free to play will not secure the future of the game since they have to pay anyway, the sub model for this one exception is the only buisness model for now, free to play is not an option unless they sign a new contract with Lucasart (which will not happen since Lucasart got them by the Balls)
Diablow 3, it sucks ...
Sorry SWTOR haters, my server is heavy on the weekends......dream on....
in those very same threads you could find posts that stated SWTOR would be at 4 million subs or even more laughable, kill WoW. You cannot just take 1 post and take that as the overall opinion of one side or the other. Both sides have people that don't base their opinions on any information at all. F2P in 6 months would just never happen because it takes that long just to develop the cash shop and test it. They will at least stick it out to month 6 to see what subs they have and where they are going before starting on it. At the very earliest it would be F2P at the end of a year, but more like 1.5-2 years. The better money is on never though since WAR never went F2P.
Those of us with realistic views figured that SWTOR would be somewhere around 1 million subs(50% retention) by the 3rd month after release. At the 6 month mark more like 750k and by the end of the year settling in at around 400k-500k steady subs. As for mroe doom and gloom to come, sorry but dead servers don't even need to be predicted. Dead servers are simply a fact at this point. At 80%+ of US servers being light at peak times there are more than a few dead servers already.
SWTOR is failing. If they weren't we wouldn't be seeing them give out tons of free time, vanity pets, titles, etc in an attempt to get people to stay/resub. Is the game going to shut down inside of the year? Or even 3? Probably not, but it won't be gaining huge numbers of subscribers. For the time/money that went into making SWTOR it simply isn't up to customer expectations. It might break even or even make some profit, but the users expecations and what they got, it will be a failure.
Ohh..the sweet irony..hahahaha!!
Their statement was that even 500k subs would turn a profit, just nothing to write home about.
There are a few servers that are busy, however most of them are empty. When you have 52 folks on the imperial fleet during prime time, you visit the world and take a look. You can count just around 200 folks playing, that's not good. It has been months since we had world layering, you know the multi instances of worlds due to folk playing.
All one has to do is look at the heavily moderated forums and watch all thew new we need a server merge threads get rolled up into the new thread. Watch the we need free character transfer thread get deleted.
The population might be stable on some servers, but not all of them.
Now I don't think were to the free to play point yet, but it is obvious that we got player retention problems.
I'm still standing by my prediction that the game will have its plug pulled by December of this year. And I'm basing that prediction on Lucas' dissatisfaction with his stake and percentage on sales and, more importantly, having a property out there with the Star Wars name that is received poorly. (Remember, this is the guy that tried to erase the Star Wars Christmas Special from history.)
I think the suggestion to cancel the game will come from Lucas himself and EA will comply. I don't see SWTOR going F2P.
I could be entirely wrong, but this is my gut feeling.
Re: SWTOR
"Remember, remember - Kakk says 'December.'"
I am just waiting for the moment where the devs finally admit deateat and say, "yes, we actually do have less that 1.7 million subs."
Yes, we were counting free players.
Yes, the 6 month subs hadn't run out yet.
Yes, we have 400k subs now.
The crazy part is they will likely, after constantly bringing up their lack of sub loss, never bring up another reference to subs again. Ever. Servers will be empty, they will smash 'em together, but they will never again mention anything about how "healthy" their game is again.
If it goes the same way as Warhammer Online then they (EA) won't go F2P, they will just let it fizzle and milk the remaining subs.