SWTOR Gains 2 Million Users from F2P

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."

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  • Stimpack
    Good, bad, or ugly, they're going to say this game is doing great until the day it shuts down.

    I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything, but that's just how it works.
    Reply
  • rawoysters
    When is Tom's going to do something about these worthless spammers?
    Reply
  • seller417
    Brilliant, WOW will be next
    Reply
  • shikamaru31789
    MMO's need to stop trying to be WoW. You are not goinmg to succeed by making a WoW clone and adopting a P2P business model. WoW succeeds because it has so much content. There's no feasable way you can make a new MMO with as much content as WoW or EVE or any of the other MMO's that are still P2P. Players will burn through the content in a new MMO quick, and either move on to the next new MMO or back to an older one. That's what happened to me in SWTOR, I leveled 2 characters to max and got bored because there wasn't much endgame content. I wasn't going to keep paying $15 a month to level more characters to max.
    Reply
  • mazty
    "two million new accounts have been created "
    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.
    Reply
  • memadmax
    seller417Brilliant, WOW will be nextHighly 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...
    Reply
  • Gundam288
    memadmaxHighly 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....
    Reply
  • griptwister
    I would love to play it... IF I COULD INSTALL IT!!! I spent hours trying to get it to install and download... tinkered with it, and no such luck!!! It's a total waste of time... If they can fix the installer, I would consider playing it.
    Reply
  • inz0mn1ak
    i enjoyed it when i played and now that its free to play i log on from time to time, its a great game
    Reply
  • unksol
    Just imagine the money they could have made if they hadn't trashed kotor III into yet another junky MMO like WOW
    Reply