Electronic Arts warming up to Free to Play – Video Games Update
John Riccitiello, the CEO of Electronic Arts, has sent a message to the company’s shareholders explaining the Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) conundrum and the benefits of going Free to Play.
Electronic Arts (EA) is in trouble. The publisher has reportedly invested over $500 million into the development of SWTOR, a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG), which was planned to be a World of Warcraft, the most popular and profitable
MMORPG in the market right now, killer. However, things didn’t go quite as planned as the SWTOR player-base is falling fast.
Bioware Austin, the developer in-charge of making SWTOR, is currently facing major ‘restructuring’ and many employees have been laid off. The few gamers who bought the game and are still playing have been noted to complain on the forums that the servers
are almost empty and they can’t find anyone to play with. The game feels more like a single player RPG than a MMO and this is one of the reasons why gamers have stopped playing once they were done with the main quest.
EA announced in June that the game would be going free to play up to level 15 for all characters in order to attract new players who would have to pay subscriptions if they wanted to play more. The plan doesn’t seem to be working and EA might be considering
to fully adopting the Free to Play model with online micro transactions.
"There's a lot of power in free-to-play. And by the way, for what it's worth, free-to-play is anything but free. We have lots of games that are 'free-to-play', where paying users are giving us ten, twenty, thirty dollars a month. What happens is the first
game play is free, but then when you get into the game you have to pay for things," stated Riccitiello in his message to the investors.
This clearly means that EA is about to make SWTOR completely free to play and this message was just the company’s attempt to butter up the investors so that they don’t react negatively to the news leading to a drop in the share price. It might also be a
plea from Riccitiello to ensure his job security as EA’s stock has taken quite a nasty hit in the six months since SWTOR was launched and the CEO is likely to get the blame for that.
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