Bioware finds itself in hot water after their Star Wars MMO fails to take the throne from Activision/Blizzard’s World of Warcraft.
Once fan favourites and creators of popular games such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTR), Jade Empire and the Mass Effect series have slowly fallen from the good graces of gamers after they were acquired by the popular publishing giant Electronic
Arts (EA).
EA put Bioware incharge of creating Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR), a subscription based Massively Multiplayer Online game (MMO) which was planned to be EA’s World of Warcraft killer.
The Warcraft franchise is owned by Activision/Blizzard and World of Warcraft is the most popular MMO to date. EA claims that it invested around $200 million into the project but analysts estimate that EA’s stake in the project might be as much as over half
a billion dollars. If that’s the case then TOR is one of the most expensive games ever developed.
“I think it’s safe to say that the total all-in investment in ‘Star Wars’ is probably approaching half a billion dollars, EA has minimized its risks as much as it can on this bet, but it’s still a risky bet. To the extent that any one game defines his tenure,
it’s going to be how ‘Star Wars’ performs.” said Doug Creutz who is an analyst at Cowen & Co.
The game launched for America and Europe in December 2011 and three months later in Australia. Initially the game was met with a favourable reception from fans and broke MMO records with the number of subscriptions at launch. It was received well with critics
having an average Meta score of 85 on Metacritic.
“We previously described to folks that 500,000 subscribers saw the game as substantially profitable, but it's not the kind of thing that we would write home about,[But] anything north of 1 million subscribers is a very profitable business." said EA CEO John
Riccitiello in an interview on February 2, 2011.
Things were looking good for EA post launch as SWTOR had reached over two million subscription count and was on its way to becoming a well established MMO in the market. Things took an ugly turn as the early adopters of the MMO soon discovered that not only
was SWTOR full of game-breaking bugs and lacking polish that should’ve been there because of the long development time and the large budget.
However, Bioware was not remedying the situation quickly enough. Gamers who complained on the official forums were either ignored or banned by the SWTOR community manager. The online hate for the game sprouted new internet memes such as ‘Bioware’s Tortanic’
and ‘Titanic the 2nd’.
This escalated to a point where the fans got sick and tired of waiting for game update patches that would fix or incorporate features that were promised to them by Bioware and EA on day one. As a result there has been a significant drop in subscriptions.
It is estimated that there are only around 60,000 subscribers left out of the two million.
This has resulted in Bioware to merge game servers, a usually simple operation, which also did not go according to plan as it has been reported that many users have lost their created character in the game after the server merge or are being forced to create
new ones if they want to continue playing on the new merger servers.
Bioware announced on EA’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) show that the game will be going free to play up until Level 15 in the game. Never a good sign for a subscription based MMO so early in its life. Judging by other failed MMOs, SWTOR can be expected
to go fully free to play after three or four months if the decreasing subscription trends continue.
DISCLAIMER: The views and the opinions expressed in this article are the writer’s own and do not reflect the editorial policy of bettor.com.
Tags: