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Why is this game considered a failure?
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Probably. Can't remember all mmorpg turnarounds.
However, It's important to keep in mind SWTOR was the "biggest" mmo in terms of general hype ever (atleast as far as i can remember). When i say this, i'm refering to how "big" everything about TOR marketing was.
Hundreds of millions in development, Star Wars IP, Bioware (which at the time was a hugely acclaimed dev), EA (money), all those long GCI trailers, etc. It was something that in terms of how well know it was, was probably the biggest mmo to date and most likely to "beat wow" do it's solo oriented appeal.
The phrase "to big to fail" comes to mind. That's also the reason it was given the name Tortanic. It was a really huge deal, but it sank in just a similar huge way.
Now, TOR as made a comeback, but ignore the abysmal fall is delusional. Anyway, i'm not hating it if it seemed like it. I don't care for TOR at all, so i can't talk about it's improvements.
All that matters is that it's making a profit now and if so many people are enjoying it (i've read 400-500k subs not counting f2players, which is really big actually), it's all good. Happy gaming.
You have some serious rose colored glasses going on there. Pre NGE SWG was on the doorstep of being shutdown due to bleeding subs and this was before F2P was acceptable in the western market as a way to save games like this. NGE didn't save SWG but it did buy it a few years of life support.
Doesn't matter that there weren't as many games out then - SWG was and IS still better than SWTOR and you'll find that more people agree with me than you on this. SWTOR's game engine alone makes it bad bad bad. Crafting in SWG was incredible and complex...housing was non instanced and you could have your own store (and even city) to decorate and people would HAVE to visit your store to pick up their purchases. Resources were spawned and varied in stats and once were gone they were gone making them a rare commodity in themselves.
SWTOR had voice acting...no housing....an interesting take on the crafting system but failed at level cap (and everybody else's crafted items are the same) PVP system that was broken...terrible game engine (bad coding) and overall uninteresting gameplay.
It lost a HUGE majority of it's subs only 2 months after launch - and that was because the game sucked not because EA changed the game on people and had to go FTP only a year after launch because it was dying.
A success? Nope.
Edit: Also - I did come back a month ago to see if there was any improvement and the game engine still sucked...pvp still sucked...crafting was still worthless at level cap...still no housing...space game is a joke....etc etc.
Currently playing SWTOR and it's MUCH better than it was at launch.
Uh...NO. I played SWG and the game was booming before the NGE and continued to be profitable albeit on a smaller scale than Wow - which is what SOE and LA were wanting a part of - they just went about it the wrong way and pissed off the players who quit in mass when the NGE hit.
Currently playing SWTOR and it's MUCH better than it was at launch.
Easy, because it didn't live up to the devs and publishers expectations. They had a table for how the game would gain subscribers and it worked like it for 3 months and then the table said they would gain gamers but instead they lost plenty of subs.
Sure, the game is still up and running and earning some money of course but EA hoped for a lot more. And considering it is the most expensive computer game ever made the return of each dollar they put into the game isn't that impressive, particularly if you compare with games like Wow or the first Guildwars.
It could have been a lot worse but EA thought they would have several million players paying a monthly fee right now.
LMAO SWG was NEVER considered to be "Booming". Good games don't get changes to their fundamental systems like the NGE. SWG was already heavily losing subs pre-NGE.
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I got it when it came out and it was fun till I hit end game and it was so easy, now that its "F2P" I would not mind playing it again, I am sure that there would be more things to do now that they had time to work out stuff...if it was not for the one of the worst free to play model ever made. Only thing that can be considered free is the story. Even the Preferred Status is an insulte(sadly)
http://www.swtor.com/free/features
Not so strange, SWGs development cost were just 8 million dollars (Sonys own numbers) so getting that back was not hard.
But the NGE did starting to bleed the game of players and eventually did Sony think that they could use the resources and devs better at other projects.
Do not forget about the CU that came out before the NGE
By what I understand most people left when the CU hit before the NGE came out. I kinda feel the CU was the start of the end for SWG, but that's my opinion
It may be profitable, but they continue to frustrate and alienate a major portion of the MMO player base due to their continued design choices. Many wanted full space flight off rails, instead they got freeform space flight but only as a pvp match you que up for. The players wanted massive PvP in an open setting, and instead of fixing issues with their version of this, they remove it from the game, etc.
I think a lot of the frustration stems from what this game could have been... Watch the player housing they have teased. I have no doubt it will be lacking in almost every way.
It was already on it's way before the CU. The CU was just the bolder they tossed it while it was struggling to swim. When developers do things out of desperation to save the game....it wasn't booming.
Tor is surely the greater success. Look at the expansion.
"If the Damned gave you a roadmap, then you'd know just where to go"
Yeah, but to be fair, most games that that objective. If we use that as a standard, then GW2 was an even bigger failure than SWTOR, since Colin Johansen couldn't stop running his mouth about wanting to be the new #1 game on the market. Hell, they even had that ridiculous "Pledge of Allegience to GW2" marketing ploy to back it up. Few developers have been as brazen as GW2 in that respect.
SWTOR is turning a profit. Not as big of a profit, or in the way they'd imagined, but it's got a solid player base and is successful as a game. The major problem was that by the time they were halfway through their development cycle, there had been a fundamental shift in popularity away from the type of game they'd spent so much time developing. By that time, it was too late to turn back.
The game isnt to bad, it has many flaws but for me it is just way to boring. pvp isnt anything unique, pve same. Crafting looked to be something cool then it turned out to be pretty much the same. The one thing that kept me playing for awhile was that it was Starwars.
To the Pro SWTOR Audience using this thread to defend the game... Its like you want to make excuses for people here saying why the game failed in their eyes...
For me, I could care less about SWG or the IP but looking at the game as an MMO i was disappointed at launch. I didn't get to run all the dungeons the game offered because there was no group finder and everyone was trying to solo to max level and no one wanted to group for them. I kept playing and tried to enjoy the game even though i had to skip like 5 million cut scenes cause i really don't enjoy that single player type of story game(I like to play with other people). When i finally hit max level i didn't enjoy PVP and there was only like 1 raid and the gear that came from that wasn't better than the PVP gear i had had. Just didn't really have any real progression and i had only been playing for like 2 weeks. It got boring quick and when i read about the people not subbing and people calling it a Fail game i understood. So yea don't take offense just try to realize that even though they have improved the game since it released its first impression was terrible for most the player base.
For a Dev to release a product that falls short on the most basic fundamentals that MMO fans expect is a failure. In short everything could have been improved or made unique. If your gonna release have a solid endgame especially when it only takes 2 weeks to get there...
To the rest i agree with you.
No, actually, I won't. Look up the numbers. TOR on it's worst day still had more players than SWG on it's best day. Like I said before, if a given individual (you, in this case) happened to prefer SWG, that is fine, everybody has different tastes. But it is a measurable fact that TOR is more popular than SWG, and has been since the day it launched.
Phrases like "in their eyes" and "For me" have no place in a discussion of success vs. failure, they belong in a discussion of like vs. dislike. Success is a question of fact, not opinion, and if a game turns a profit, it's successful. If you have to redefine a word in order for your argument to work, your argument doesn't work.
But they didn't reduce their capacity by as much as that implies, because they also redid their servers to greatly increase how many players each server could handle. And I could be wrong, but I don't recall seeing anywhere near that many servers at launch.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
For me, the game was a success.
They got my money for serveral months and managed to milk me properly.
I barely felt better fooled ever.
Successful businesses don't have to fire people because they don't make enough money, the bare minimum is that they keep their staff, but preferably they would be expanding to increase their profits.
Swtor was a sinking ship, and the only way they could turn it around was by slashing costs and changing payment model, its a successful f2p game, but as P2P it was a failure.
I would not call SWTOR a "failure". It did well in the beginning but was unable to live up to the hype. Many people were expecting Bioware to put their own mark on a SWG2 rather then the very linear game that they gave us. SWTOR is a good story teller of Star Wars from the era they selected. However, the depth of the game beyond that point just is flat or too similar to every other MMO out today. And while EA claims SWTOR is doing well, it is not doing as well as it was a launch. Not a failure, just did not live up to expectations.
Let's party like it is 1863!
One reason is the inability for people to pay for a sub with a credit card. That is why I quit this game shortly after release. I tried to sub recently and they still have the same problems.
They quit trying as soon as it was released. And no I'm not using paypal. If you fail as a company that hard, why should I even bother.
A game being profitable, and a game being good, are sometimes two very different things. Also, your numbers are telling only part of the story. Yes, they sold 3M out the game. Yes, they hit close to 2M within a month. Except that by the third month, they stopped advertising sub numbers, and servers became dead. Most estimates peg their playerbase to be around 750k by that time.
The next six months were a mixture of empty promises to add content, fix bugs, and claims that "our numbers are great!" Right up until the whole "by the way, we're going F2P now" before the game hit 1 year.
During the first year, the game was not good, and it was not diong well financially. The transition to F2P has certainly allowed them to make money, so that's good for the bottom line, but they are doing so largely on the back of gambling boxes. New content has been added, but by and large it's been the wrong kind of content. The game is mostly the same today as it was in the first year, at least in terms of end-game engagement from the player base.
Another misleading thing is that it's easy to start playing, and feel like it's this crazy busy game because the first few worlds are chocked full. Even the content at generally impressive. You're first trip to the Essels instance set's a very favorable impression for how the game handles dungeons and storytelling, etc. Except that it's basically smoke and mirrors because the experience goes down hill after that.
But yeah, they are making money now. So I guess if you are a shareholder or something, you can get excited.
You make me like charity
I pay for my sub with my credit card, and always have. What in the world are you talking about?
This is worse than that post a few days back with someone claiming they would not play ESO because it didn't have swimming in it
Because their devs said it would be the game to kill WoW but in fact ended up making a piss poor WoW clone. WoW lost more than TWICE the number of subscribers that SWTOR claims to currently have an it's still going strong.
On the F2P front this game is VERY restrictive in terms of features.