Originally posted by zinger71 I already have a paid sub and don't logon. How will this will change this for me?
It probably won't, but it will likely bring in a lot of people. Like I've said many times, SWTOR is not currently up to the standards necessary to make it a worthwhile p2p game. It's just not. It's got a (supposedly) wonderful story, but that only entertains you for a short time, and afterward everyone is inevitably left feeling bored. F2P suits the game far more, gives people a chance to play and experience that story, get invested in the game, and since they're not paying for it they're more likely to continue logging in and populating the areas, even if only for a short amount of time throughout the week, than if they felt obligated to due to monthly fees.
SWToR is really not a great P2P game, but as an F2P it would be one of the best in its market. A larger population would have access to the game because the barrier of entry is gone, a cash shop would get some income flow and hopefully it would stabilize the game and developers enough that they can focus on creating in-depth, additional content rather than the tripe they've been releasing for it up to this point.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
I dont think this has to deal with the quality of the game, but a (major) shift in the MMORPG industry. With AAA tiltes like GW2 going B2P/F2P it will be hard for *any* MMORPG to compete with a subscription based model.
Its not just the money being pumped out, as many can pay (multiple) 20/month without batting an eye. I feel its coming down value. With a monthly sub (at least for me) there is this commitment to play every day or for most days in a month to get your 'value' for the monthly fee you are paying. If you only get to play 2-3 days one month due to real life, work, family, etc you start to feel like you 'wasted' that 20 dollars. That starts the general decision process should you cancel or not. Would this sub be better with another MMO, etc.
F2P started out as crappy Asian-themed titles. Fun, but not as polished as the sub-based games. Now as their quality improves and begin to offer experiences people want to play its very hard to leave that and then start paying for something else.
Case in point. It was very easy to pre-purchase GW2 without even seeing it (though I did my research) because even if I hated the game after two months I would have got my 60 dollars worth out of it. And even better I could return a year later and see whats new. I dont feel obligated to play or forced to enjoy it.
Now on the flip side I am beta testing the Secret World which has actually surprised me, though I feel the combat is lacking. But its a lot HARDER to decide if I will sub and play this game. Where if it was F2P I would have pre-purchased it as well.
Perhaps its because I come from the console side of the house, where I'm used to buying a game then just playing it. I dont even have XBOX Live because I dont play online that often, it would be a 'waste'
Now some claim "You pay more money without a sub, they nickel and dime you in the Cash shop" Pay to Win is subjective on what you believe 'winning' is in a game. Even if you could buy ultra-uber sword of power in the cash shop, what someone else does really doesnt have an effect on MY gameplay. Though can understand it may upset others. In terms of regular cash shops never use them and even if *I* did, I still would spend less than the 180year a sub would cost me.
In terms of SWTOR, I had a 3-month sub and purchased day1. Stopped playing 30 days later. 20 days after that unsubbed. If it went F2P I would play all 8 stories. I think others would too.
Outside of my opinion above, I do believe the shift is continuing and we will see more games investigating how to move to F2P while remaining profitable at the same time.
SWTOR is a very good game and all Bioware have stated is that they are looking into F2P options. An endless trial is a F2P option for example. However, what would be really cool would be 1-49 F2P and 50 as small sub, with DLC expansions at a small purchase cost. SWTOR is looking good here, heck, it's Star Wars folks!
Well I spotted the sarcastic tone!
It was the last line that tipped me off... then I LOLed.
On one of these forums, I am not sure if it was her or Masively, someone put up a document from a survey that Bioware did on the upcoming expansion, and was asking different price points for thier next expansion, which some feel might be free, but by the looks of the survey they are trying to squeexe the max amount of money out of the derailing train, so how does this relate to F2P...
I think going F2P will garner them the most money out of the expansion, with the cost being probably around 29.99, with a cash shop for cosmetics (Look like your favorite Star Wars characters-which was mentioned in the survey)...
Let's say for the sake of argument that the current player subscriber is between 500,000 and a mil ( I don't think they are over a mil currently, no matter what fanbois want to argue) and most of those players are really on life support, so if they release an expansion, they will make very little money with the current playerbase (maybe 25% will actually purchase it) or they will have to give it away free because people want some sort of reason to come back to the game...
If they were a good company, they would admit that things didn't start out quite the way they wanted, drop the current cost of subscription, fix the game, and give the expansion away free and then reboot subscription like Final Fantasy did...
If they did that, sure, they wouldn't male any money, but a lot of us might just forgive them and come back because the game would have new content, new races, and a lot of people to play with, because a lot of us genuinely wanted to like this game and make it our next big game to run with friends for the next few years, but the suits at EA/Bioware refused to think of us as a community but as dollar bills...
So as dollar bills, they will not fix the game and give us free content as a way of saying thanks, but instea, they will diguise a pig with lipstick and say "Hey, look its a free 2 play pig"....
By going F2p, it opens up the cash shop, brings in a few million players, and now that they have the hamsters in the cage, they drop the xp pack for different prices (ala LOTRO) and stuff it with cosmetic purchases to make a cash grab from all those new F2P players, while...
Underneath, the game is still a broken mess...
They are not going the DDO, LOTRO route, but the DCU route..
Make megaservers, go F2p, and sell expansion packs after xp pack of powers that should have been in the game to begin with, or are just a rehash of effect blooms that were already in the game while still not fixing the glaring problems with the game...
Don't let them fool you, F2P is the only way they can continue to make profit off this game. They don'y care about the playerbase, period.
I wouldn't play this steaming pile of poo if they paid me to play it. It's a terrible game for having supposedly having $150 million invested into it. Such a waste of money. Hell, they should have donated that money to a noble cause if they were just going to create a horrid mess of a game like they did. And this coming from an avid Star Wars fan. May the Force NOT be with you, BioWare.
I still remember the arrogance of the devs: - No preorder for certain European countries at start - Vanishing cancel subscription button - Bans for people who found certain dumb game mechanics - Bribes in the form of founder titles if you bought another month of subscription (lol didn't give a damn about people who followed the game from the start)
...
BW or EA I don't care they made the most expensive piece of cr.. to date. I only hope that they are a little humbled now and that they will finally grasp the concept: the customer is always right
.. or maybe not.
p.s. Oh I almost forgot: thank you fanb...s, you really helped the game to become what it is today.
I have been saying it would go F2P in about a year after release for months before release, so it is nice to see that my predictions were not too far off. The game was geared for this from the start! The features just are not aimed at community building like EVE or SWG is.
lol Blizzaard has beat them all. For years we were eharing about thiwand that game will dead wow and blizzard. The only way these games can even stay competetitive now is to go F2P bloody joke. Half these games that have come out in the past 5-7 years have probabaly had greater the budget of the intital wow, and some slightly lebut by no means a small amount. Yet the only games that have seemed to flourish in the post wow era have been wow, and eve, and maybe some asian f2pgames. Roll on the pretenders, blizzard is waiting to turn you all into F2P games hahah
Some people's double-standards are showing. The ones who gush over how good GW was with the initial buy prices and no sub fees... What SWTOR is doing this? FAIL! (that's sarcasm, just incase you're horrible at discerning such things).
The meshing of trying to put single player story and a mmo didn't work the way they did it...I do not hold my game money as a shiney thing on top of a hill, so I got my money out of TOR (just played the free month)....It just wasn't worth paying for, or playing anymore. I highly doubt I would play even for free. The crafting is a joke, I think I maxed it out in like a couple hours...The content they are adding, from what I have seen is the same stuff that caused people to leave, I would have doubts with the budget/staff cuts that they would be delivering the same quality if it was what you liked also...
I really don't see a way to fix TOR, without doing some type of NGE that makes SWG's look minor...I think it is a broken model, planets would need reworked, crafting, pvp, questing...
I think their best bet is to get it the way they want it, drain any money out of subs they can while they rework some kind of f2p system that includes something to maybe sell people that they will feel they need to have, like maybe add a capatins quarters to everyones ships, and sell furniture and decorations that they can show off to friends, maybe even instanced housing like EQ2, or some different ships...who knows, people like Star Wars and will buy 'cool' things. Keep the cookie cutter updates, and string people along with sparse adds to keep the costs down....They should atleast be able to make their money back, before they have to renegotiate their licensing deal with Lucas Arts and are forced out of business by the cost/profit ratio.
lol Blizzaard has beat them all. For years we were eharing about thiwand that game will dead wow and blizzard. The only way these games can even stay competetitive now is to go F2P bloody joke. Half these games that have come out in the past 5-7 years have probabaly had greater the budget of the intital wow, and some slightly lebut by no means a small amount. Yet the only games that have seemed to flourish in the post wow era have been wow, and eve, and maybe some asian f2pgames. Roll on the pretenders, blizzard is waiting to turn you all into F2P games hahah
You are wrong about them having a bigger budget than WoW. WoWs budget was ridiculously huge, especially its marketing budget. The marketing is a big part of what helped WoW hit critical mass and all the people who would not have normally played had to try it because they had friends playing and talking about it.
lol Blizzaard has beat them all. For years we were eharing about thiwand that game will dead wow and blizzard. The only way these games can even stay competetitive now is to go F2P bloody joke. Half these games that have come out in the past 5-7 years have probabaly had greater the budget of the intital wow, and some slightly lebut by no means a small amount. Yet the only games that have seemed to flourish in the post wow era have been wow, and eve, and maybe some asian f2pgames. Roll on the pretenders, blizzard is waiting to turn you all into F2P games hahah
You are wrong about them having a bigger budget than WoW. WoWs budget was ridiculously huge, especially its marketing budget. The marketing is a big part of what helped WoW hit critical mass and all the people who would not have normally played had to try it because they had friends playing and talking about it.
Newsflash blizzards biggest tool was totall FREE, and you know what it was? WORD OF MOUTH. Bigger than aany marketing campaign can ever do. Lol if you think blizzard back then in bloody the early 200's had anywhere near the budget that some of these mmos have now you must be living in cloud fland. Yes their budget was big. But they had something priceless that none of these mmos can even manage to get and thats word of mouth, the biggest free tool in human history.
SWTOR is a very good game and all Bioware have stated is that they are looking into F2P options. An endless trial is a F2P option for example. However, what would be really cool would be 1-49 F2P and 50 as small sub, with DLC expansions at a small purchase cost. SWTOR is looking good here, heck, it's Star Wars folks!
"heck, it's Star Wars folks!"
this line right here pretty much invalidates all your past and future opinions
lol Blizzaard has beat them all. For years we were eharing about thiwand that game will dead wow and blizzard. The only way these games can even stay competetitive now is to go F2P bloody joke. Half these games that have come out in the past 5-7 years have probabaly had greater the budget of the intital wow, and some slightly lebut by no means a small amount. Yet the only games that have seemed to flourish in the post wow era have been wow, and eve, and maybe some asian f2pgames. Roll on the pretenders, blizzard is waiting to turn you all into F2P games hahah
You are wrong about them having a bigger budget than WoW. WoWs budget was ridiculously huge, especially its marketing budget. The marketing is a big part of what helped WoW hit critical mass and all the people who would not have normally played had to try it because they had friends playing and talking about it.
How spurious of you.
World of Warcraft's budget is estimated to have been $40 million dollars. Adjusted for inflation, that's well under a fifth of what was reported to have been spent on SWTOR, and less than most other MMOs recently have had at their backs.
Rift cost around $50 million, which is a comparable sum. AoC had a similar budget originally, and then piled on an additional $30 million later in development, with an estimated total cost of around $70 million. Warhammer Online was estimated to have bettwen $100 million and $200 million at its disposal. The cancelled Halo MMO had $90 million. The Secret World if reported to have a budget between $70 and $80 million. And Guild Wars 2 is suspected of being ArenaNet's highest budget game, previously a title held by Aion (at an estaimted $80 million).
In short, World of Warcraft cost a similar, to lower, sum of money to make and market on release than most other competing MMOs. It's success was due to many factors, but its budget was not one of the leading factors. It's timing, it's target audience, it long term "trickle down" marketing pre-TBC, it's leveraging of budget computers, and a number of other things were major factors.
Originally posted by Asmiroth20 Some people's double-standards are showing. The ones who gush over how good GW was with the initial buy prices and no sub fees... What SWTOR is doing this? FAIL! (that's sarcasm, just incase you're horrible at discerning such things).
im sorry, but do you not realize or can you not understand GW LAUNCHED as B2P and did quite well with that business model ? ...by way of comparison, SWTOR launched as a P2P game with expectations of 1 million subs (if not more), SWTOR is now floundering so bad that 6 months in they are desperately grasping at alternate business models as they try in vain to salvage their train wreck of a game.
Comments
I might even try it if it goes f2p.
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Looks like they pulled the article at GamesTM.....
.....the plot thickens.
It probably won't, but it will likely bring in a lot of people. Like I've said many times, SWTOR is not currently up to the standards necessary to make it a worthwhile p2p game. It's just not. It's got a (supposedly) wonderful story, but that only entertains you for a short time, and afterward everyone is inevitably left feeling bored. F2P suits the game far more, gives people a chance to play and experience that story, get invested in the game, and since they're not paying for it they're more likely to continue logging in and populating the areas, even if only for a short amount of time throughout the week, than if they felt obligated to due to monthly fees.
SWToR is really not a great P2P game, but as an F2P it would be one of the best in its market. A larger population would have access to the game because the barrier of entry is gone, a cash shop would get some income flow and hopefully it would stabilize the game and developers enough that they can focus on creating in-depth, additional content rather than the tripe they've been releasing for it up to this point.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
In my honest opinion, they should close up shop before considering going F2P.
"Good, honorable gamers will continue to fit the bill for the poor and lower classed people. It's just a sign of the times." ~ Anonymous. Lakexeno.com
I dont think this has to deal with the quality of the game, but a (major) shift in the MMORPG industry. With AAA tiltes like GW2 going B2P/F2P it will be hard for *any* MMORPG to compete with a subscription based model.
Its not just the money being pumped out, as many can pay (multiple) 20/month without batting an eye. I feel its coming down value. With a monthly sub (at least for me) there is this commitment to play every day or for most days in a month to get your 'value' for the monthly fee you are paying. If you only get to play 2-3 days one month due to real life, work, family, etc you start to feel like you 'wasted' that 20 dollars. That starts the general decision process should you cancel or not. Would this sub be better with another MMO, etc.
F2P started out as crappy Asian-themed titles. Fun, but not as polished as the sub-based games. Now as their quality improves and begin to offer experiences people want to play its very hard to leave that and then start paying for something else.
Case in point. It was very easy to pre-purchase GW2 without even seeing it (though I did my research) because even if I hated the game after two months I would have got my 60 dollars worth out of it. And even better I could return a year later and see whats new. I dont feel obligated to play or forced to enjoy it.
Now on the flip side I am beta testing the Secret World which has actually surprised me, though I feel the combat is lacking. But its a lot HARDER to decide if I will sub and play this game. Where if it was F2P I would have pre-purchased it as well.
Perhaps its because I come from the console side of the house, where I'm used to buying a game then just playing it. I dont even have XBOX Live because I dont play online that often, it would be a 'waste'
Now some claim "You pay more money without a sub, they nickel and dime you in the Cash shop" Pay to Win is subjective on what you believe 'winning' is in a game. Even if you could buy ultra-uber sword of power in the cash shop, what someone else does really doesnt have an effect on MY gameplay. Though can understand it may upset others. In terms of regular cash shops never use them and even if *I* did, I still would spend less than the 180year a sub would cost me.
In terms of SWTOR, I had a 3-month sub and purchased day1. Stopped playing 30 days later. 20 days after that unsubbed. If it went F2P I would play all 8 stories. I think others would too.
Outside of my opinion above, I do believe the shift is continuing and we will see more games investigating how to move to F2P while remaining profitable at the same time.
I had bought this game a long time ago if it was buy to play(B2P)
Well I spotted the sarcastic tone!
It was the last line that tipped me off... then I LOLed.
Who said that anyway?
"..., heck, it's Star Wars folks! "
was it a reviewer here in MMORPG.com?
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
if people thought SOE was bad with their F2P model
just wait till EA tries it lmao
On one of these forums, I am not sure if it was her or Masively, someone put up a document from a survey that Bioware did on the upcoming expansion, and was asking different price points for thier next expansion, which some feel might be free, but by the looks of the survey they are trying to squeexe the max amount of money out of the derailing train, so how does this relate to F2P...
I think going F2P will garner them the most money out of the expansion, with the cost being probably around 29.99, with a cash shop for cosmetics (Look like your favorite Star Wars characters-which was mentioned in the survey)...
Let's say for the sake of argument that the current player subscriber is between 500,000 and a mil ( I don't think they are over a mil currently, no matter what fanbois want to argue) and most of those players are really on life support, so if they release an expansion, they will make very little money with the current playerbase (maybe 25% will actually purchase it) or they will have to give it away free because people want some sort of reason to come back to the game...
If they were a good company, they would admit that things didn't start out quite the way they wanted, drop the current cost of subscription, fix the game, and give the expansion away free and then reboot subscription like Final Fantasy did...
If they did that, sure, they wouldn't male any money, but a lot of us might just forgive them and come back because the game would have new content, new races, and a lot of people to play with, because a lot of us genuinely wanted to like this game and make it our next big game to run with friends for the next few years, but the suits at EA/Bioware refused to think of us as a community but as dollar bills...
So as dollar bills, they will not fix the game and give us free content as a way of saying thanks, but instea, they will diguise a pig with lipstick and say "Hey, look its a free 2 play pig"....
By going F2p, it opens up the cash shop, brings in a few million players, and now that they have the hamsters in the cage, they drop the xp pack for different prices (ala LOTRO) and stuff it with cosmetic purchases to make a cash grab from all those new F2P players, while...
Underneath, the game is still a broken mess...
They are not going the DDO, LOTRO route, but the DCU route..
Make megaservers, go F2p, and sell expansion packs after xp pack of powers that should have been in the game to begin with, or are just a rehash of effect blooms that were already in the game while still not fixing the glaring problems with the game...
Don't let them fool you, F2P is the only way they can continue to make profit off this game. They don'y care about the playerbase, period.
I wouldn't play this steaming pile of poo if they paid me to play it. It's a terrible game for having supposedly having $150 million invested into it. Such a waste of money. Hell, they should have donated that money to a noble cause if they were just going to create a horrid mess of a game like they did. And this coming from an avid Star Wars fan. May the Force NOT be with you, BioWare.
Smile
Not having a sub would place this game more into the catagory it should be in, a single player RPG with multi player online capabilities.
As a SRPG SWTOR is a great game, as an MMO...not even close...so, not having to pay to play it makes it worth it.
No matter how cynical you become, its never enough to keep up - Lily Tomlin
I still remember the arrogance of the devs:
- No preorder for certain European countries at start
- Vanishing cancel subscription button
- Bans for people who found certain dumb game mechanics
- Bribes in the form of founder titles if you bought another month of subscription (lol didn't give a damn about people who followed the game from the start)
...
BW or EA I don't care they made the most expensive piece of cr.. to date.
I only hope that they are a little humbled now and that they will finally grasp the concept: the customer is always right
.. or maybe not.
p.s. Oh I almost forgot: thank you fanb...s, you really helped the game to become what it is today.
I was in the closed beta, played for a few hours, and quit, even though it was free.
If they went F2P, I would probably download it, and play a few more hours ...
------------
2024: 47 years on the Net.
I have been saying it would go F2P in about a year after release for months before release, so it is nice to see that my predictions were not too far off. The game was geared for this from the start! The features just are not aimed at community building like EVE or SWG is.
Play as your fav retro characters: cnd-online.net. My site: www.lysle.net. Blog: creatingaworld.blogspot.com.
lol Blizzaard has beat them all. For years we were eharing about thiwand that game will dead wow and blizzard. The only way these games can even stay competetitive now is to go F2P bloody joke. Half these games that have come out in the past 5-7 years have probabaly had greater the budget of the intital wow, and some slightly lebut by no means a small amount. Yet the only games that have seemed to flourish in the post wow era have been wow, and eve, and maybe some asian f2pgames. Roll on the pretenders, blizzard is waiting to turn you all into F2P games hahah
Some people's double-standards are showing. The ones who gush over how good GW was with the initial buy prices and no sub fees... What SWTOR is doing this? FAIL! (that's sarcasm, just incase you're horrible at discerning such things).
The meshing of trying to put single player story and a mmo didn't work the way they did it...I do not hold my game money as a shiney thing on top of a hill, so I got my money out of TOR (just played the free month)....It just wasn't worth paying for, or playing anymore. I highly doubt I would play even for free. The crafting is a joke, I think I maxed it out in like a couple hours...The content they are adding, from what I have seen is the same stuff that caused people to leave, I would have doubts with the budget/staff cuts that they would be delivering the same quality if it was what you liked also...
I really don't see a way to fix TOR, without doing some type of NGE that makes SWG's look minor...I think it is a broken model, planets would need reworked, crafting, pvp, questing...
I think their best bet is to get it the way they want it, drain any money out of subs they can while they rework some kind of f2p system that includes something to maybe sell people that they will feel they need to have, like maybe add a capatins quarters to everyones ships, and sell furniture and decorations that they can show off to friends, maybe even instanced housing like EQ2, or some different ships...who knows, people like Star Wars and will buy 'cool' things. Keep the cookie cutter updates, and string people along with sparse adds to keep the costs down....They should atleast be able to make their money back, before they have to renegotiate their licensing deal with Lucas Arts and are forced out of business by the cost/profit ratio.
You are wrong about them having a bigger budget than WoW. WoWs budget was ridiculously huge, especially its marketing budget. The marketing is a big part of what helped WoW hit critical mass and all the people who would not have normally played had to try it because they had friends playing and talking about it.
Play as your fav retro characters: cnd-online.net. My site: www.lysle.net. Blog: creatingaworld.blogspot.com.
Newsflash blizzards biggest tool was totall FREE, and you know what it was? WORD OF MOUTH. Bigger than aany marketing campaign can ever do. Lol if you think blizzard back then in bloody the early 200's had anywhere near the budget that some of these mmos have now you must be living in cloud fland. Yes their budget was big. But they had something priceless that none of these mmos can even manage to get and thats word of mouth, the biggest free tool in human history.
"heck, it's Star Wars folks!"
this line right here pretty much invalidates all your past and future opinions
How spurious of you.
World of Warcraft's budget is estimated to have been $40 million dollars. Adjusted for inflation, that's well under a fifth of what was reported to have been spent on SWTOR, and less than most other MMOs recently have had at their backs.
Rift cost around $50 million, which is a comparable sum. AoC had a similar budget originally, and then piled on an additional $30 million later in development, with an estimated total cost of around $70 million. Warhammer Online was estimated to have bettwen $100 million and $200 million at its disposal. The cancelled Halo MMO had $90 million. The Secret World if reported to have a budget between $70 and $80 million. And Guild Wars 2 is suspected of being ArenaNet's highest budget game, previously a title held by Aion (at an estaimted $80 million).
In short, World of Warcraft cost a similar, to lower, sum of money to make and market on release than most other competing MMOs. It's success was due to many factors, but its budget was not one of the leading factors. It's timing, it's target audience, it long term "trickle down" marketing pre-TBC, it's leveraging of budget computers, and a number of other things were major factors.
im sorry, but do you not realize or can you not understand GW LAUNCHED as B2P and did quite well with that business model ? ...by way of comparison, SWTOR launched as a P2P game with expectations of 1 million subs (if not more), SWTOR is now floundering so bad that 6 months in they are desperately grasping at alternate business models as they try in vain to salvage their train wreck of a game.
They've already accomplished that just by releasing this half assed, cookie cutter "MMO".
I quit playing this game after 3 weeks and didnt resub after my first 30 days.
F2P might make me login for casual, 20 min play once in a while and thats actually better than nothing to BW, as population stay reasonably high.