NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Electronic Arts shook up the video gaming field last week with a major price change: Star Wars: The Old Republic, one of the most ambitious and expensive multiplayer games ever made, would soon drop its subscription fees.
The move essentially marks the end of the traditional business model for "massively multiplayer" online games, better known as MMOs. Almost every major publisher has now given in and eliminated its monthly fees -- the genre's bread-and-butter business model for the past 15 years -- relying instead on sales of premium content or virtual items to make money.
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cause it's NOT worth $15 a month!
EA has already made their money back plus some from the 3 million plus sales of SWTOR and the first 3 months of 2 million gamers paying $15 a month in subscriptions.
But the Subscription base has fallen GREATLY so EA is going to the popular F2P format to keep the game relevant and making easy money.
But all this doesn't matter cause once Guild Wars 2 gets released SWTOR is DEAD!
Free-to-play will do the exact same thing. Facebook is already there. There will be several GOOD free-to-play games to entice people into supporting the model, and then it will eventually be pay-to-win a majority of the time.
Get a grip you don't even know what your talking about , such ignorance , expect nothing less from someone who doesn't play or understand them.
" Pay-to-win models make a crap ton of money"
So does cod but you don't have to slap it all up front and feel ripped off by your purchase , don't like a f2p game ? no more micro transactions necessary , don't like cod ? have to spend more money trading it in , SIMPLES !
Dont like COD? Cool pay 60 bucks upfront and keep it, take it back and get 30 dollars back if you don't. Dont like F2P COD? Cool pay 60 dollars to get anywhere in the game, then pay another 100 bucks for micro transaction crap if you do happen to like it....Want to compete with the best? Well that'll be 5 dollars for the in-game gun, one dollar per attachment, 1 dollar per perk, 1 dollar per killstreak....oh "but you don't HAVE to pay for this stuff to play the game" yep enjoy your peon basic gun with basic perks and bare bones gameplay then, or wait a month to finally level up....
Like I said (don't worry I understand some people fail to read entire things) not ALL F2P games are bad, but to think certain greedy publishers won't exploit them to the fullest is stupid......
also Dota 2, Alien swarm, TF2 and PSO2
Do you honestly think developers are creating Free-to-play titles on purpose and changing their entire studio direction into them for no reason at all? They are just there to give you games for free? Its all charity because you enjoy games and their 60 dollar games are not needed? lmao no....Same with the DLC push, as I said, "look its great, we can add on to games, jump on board!" few years later "look we can't even put a full game on a disc, buy the rest on the DLC store!"
WoW being a perfect example. I got more free updates/upgrades from them over the years than a lot of companies put into expansions that they charge for.
Yes, it sounds great in theory, and I can see why publishers love it. But the truth is, most cases, games become less supported and content ends becoming "Pay to Win"
It suits shallow, casual, pop in and go MMOs, which, is actually the entire market right now... Can't wait for a deep, content heavy MMO to come out again.
Free-to-play might be the best route for TOR at this point because they might not have any other option but for developers like Turbine to advocate the one-size-fits-all package that requires developers to walk a high-wire that is frankly, in my opinion, impossible to do is ridiculous.
At this point, if you want to not only survive but thrive in a pay-to-play market you better put BOTH innovation and quality at a premium. I would argue that TOR got the quality part but with innovation they were left trying to beat Blizzard at their own game.
And as you said, WoW's existence shows that million will pay monthly fees to play an MMO. The only thing is that they want the content and polish at this point. It may not have had a ton of content when it first released, but by now everyone is expecting a lot of bang for their buck.
I also am not sure f2p is a business model. Its basically working for free for the developers PLUS spending money on marketing. Ask a banker if he likes to loadn money to companies who actually offer their product for free. Rockefeller became a millionaire in a similiar way, but he had a product people wanted and foremost, needed. MMO's are ten a penny, very risky thing to go f2p.
Cheap2Play would be more like it. The old arcade machines also required You to insert a coin to play, and insert loads of coins to win, and people did it, because once in a game, You wanna finish it. Seems reasonable.
I cant believe you really thought they dont make any money at all on free to play. Maybe you should look into it before judging it and commenting on it.