SWTOR Gains 2 Million Users from F2P
Making the switch to F2P was a good move for SWTOR.
In the past two years, quite a few MMOs have been making the transition to F2P with, apparently, great success. Recently, En Masse Entertainment
celebrated TERA surpassing the 1.4 million user mark just a month after making the switch.
Last year, BioWare's Star Wars MMO The Old Republic was struggling to maintain a stable player base. In 2012, the game sustained a 400K drop in players from February to March, just a few months after its official launch. The losses were heavy enough that by August, BioWare and EA were already considering making a switch to free-to-play. The transition was finalized in November last year.
Now, SWTOR is reporting that over two million new accounts have been created since the F2P change. "Since launch of the free-to-play option we have had over 2 million new accounts created and have thousands of new players jumping in every single day," said BioWare executive producer Jeff Hickman in the SWTOR "State of the Game #3" blog post. "This means more people to play with, more growth for your guilds, more Warzone matches, and more ways for players to continue to advance their characters."
I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything, but that's just how it works.
I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything, but that's just how it works.
That doesn't mean 2 million people are now playing the game. I imagine 60% at least didn't bother to come back after they realised what a mess of a WoW clone it is.
Highly doubtful....
One of the mistiques about wow is that if you work hard enough you can be an epic player.
But f2p often ends in p2w... not in the wow formula...
well, they could always sell pets and mounts....
Not at all. I think you hit the nail on the head. First and foremost, these companies are in business to make money. As soon as there is no legal repercussion to closing it down, risk mgmt say OK, and the cost of supporting it supersedes the money it brings in... i.e. it becomes dead weight to them... they will pull the plug (or sell it).
Most publicly traded companies will do this in trying to keep their quarterly share holders happy. Kind of myopic, but that's how businesses work.
content wise i got 4 words for you THE ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE , this game WILL kill WoW beause
1. it is NOT a Wow clone
2. it will have far more content than WoW offers , as it wil cover all of tameriel from skyrim to black marsh to morrowind and beyond.
I've been watching ESO closely. It's the first MMO in awhile to give me hope. I'm not sure that it will offer more content than WoW at launch. Not sure exactly how much WoW has but it must be alot, they've been adding content for what, 8 years? But, I read an article today about someone from Zenimax at PAX saying that ESO would have 400 hours of content at launch. That's pretty impressive. But ESO looks impressive all around, great graphics and art style, action combat with Skyrim like mouse clicking to attack supplemented by a small 5 slot action bar, fully voiced. I'm definitely psyched for ESO.
PvP in ESO sounds pretty impressive to me so far. Fighting for areas in Cyrodil, laying seige to enemy controlled towns. As for Guild's, I know when Jesse Cox (OMFGCata) got invited to play the game a few months ago, Zenimax had also brought in Guild Leaders from some of the main Guilds and Jesse said they were writing down ideas those Guild Leaders were giving them. So I have high hopes for the Guild system.
New MMO's since the dawn of time (of WoW?) have been praised as WoW-killers for exactly these 2 reasons prior to release. I'm thinking of Rift, SWTOR and GW2 most recently.
The thing is, prior to release people can speculate and wish all they want, but WoW's far from dead yet, much less so than quite a few of those MMO's that were promoted as being WoW-killers.