Star Wars: The Old Republic officially going free to play in autumn – Part 1
Electronic Arts (EA) finally bites the bullet as the giant publisher announced that the Star Wars based massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMO RPG), Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) will finally go free to play up to level 50 this autumn.
The MMO which was cursed to be doomed the day it was conceived is finally going free to play and this announcement comes just six months after the game came out. Normally it wouldn’t have been a big deal as countless MMOs are developed and die really quickly
but Electronic Arts is reported to have sunk over $500 million into this project.
The game lasting barely six months just shows that Bioware Austin developed a really underwhelming product which just couldn’t compete with the current MMO top-dog World of Warcraft (WOW) by Blizzard. SWTOR had the most successful launch for a MMO ever,
selling over 2 million copies in the first month but things started to go slowly downhill as gamers discovered that all the marketing and hype was nothing but smoke and mirrors and the game was nothing like the developers were leading the fans to believe.
The game’s reputation was also damaged by the fact that it was not a quality product at launch since considering the $500 million budget available, the developers did not take their time to proper polish the game and iron out the bugs and glitches.
Gamers and Fans were against most of the design decisions that Bioware was taking with the game, ever since the official forums opened up to the public, three months before the game’s release, they were flooded with fan complaints regarding many of the features
which needed improvement.
Bioware however, started to ban any user who was criticising on the forums claiming them to be ‘trolls’ and WOW fans who wanted SWTOR to fail. This action alone alienated most of the fan-base as they decided that it was useless to frequent the forums and
voice their concerns as it would just result in them getting banned and their posts deleted by the moderator.
The storm hit when the subscribers for the MMO started to fall rapidly just months after the game’s launch. This forced EA to take action and provided damage control but it was too late, gamers had already started to abandon the sinking ship.
During EA’s Electronic Entertainment Expo press conference, Bioware Austin took the stage to announce that the MMO was doing better than ever and sated that it was the best time for new players to join the experience. The main point of that announcement
was that SWTOR was going free to play up to level 15 for new users and existing users who had left the game were offered a free week trail pass so that they could check out the new updates and fixes.
This didn’t help the publisher at all and instead gave more ground to the rumours that the MMO would soon go free to play hence encouraged many eager gamers to hold off from joining the MMO for a few more months.
Continued in Part 2
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: