Star Wars: The Old Republic Goes F2P

[Savok]

Originally Posted by Ink Asylum

There's millions of people willing to visit the theme park, Blizzard just built the first one that caught on. MMOs are time sinks, most people don't play more than one. If WoW vanished tomorrow the audiences for other theme park MMOs would jump.



No it wouldn't have, because most people don't want a living, breathing world in video games, as if such a thing were possible yet.

A world without scripted, structured content takes more effort to enjoy than the profitable masses of casual gamers are willing to invest.

You deny that there is a large audience for theme park MMOs even as well over ten million people play them. Yet you believe there's a large audience for world-based MMOs even though none of the ones that currently exist have more than a million players, and most have far less.



They failed to make it work as a subscription model, because that model is outdated, and big publishers are just now figuring that out. It remains to be seen how successful and profitable they'll be as a F2P game.

I've yet to see WoW players play anything in WoW numbers. I don't completely deny they would, simply doubt. A lot of them are casual enough that if they stop playing they'll just go do something outside of gaming altogether. WoW being their hobby rather then gaming itself.

Living breathing worlds are easy, they're called MMOs. That's the whole point of the Massive part, otherwise you may as well just use a lobby system like PSO or oh look the dungeon finders on the theme parks.

I think there's a big audience for a proper Star Wars MMO that's actually good. Sadly we'll probably never know. Other then that I see them sitting around the same levels as most current MMOs, only growing rather then shrinking. Second Life was at 800k last count, having plateaued after a long period of growth. Better then TOR's currently doing.

And we're going with the subscriptions are outdated excuse, ok then.