SWTOR to go F2P.

Its official SWTOR is going free to play this fall. What is everyone think of this and what effect will it have on Bioware.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/07/31/its-official-swtor-is-going-free-to-play/

I just hope that the people who play it are all people like us who are weary of EA's sales practices and avoid making micro-transaction purchases. If so, the game will not just be a let down for the company, which it already is, but it will officially be a financial black hole. Oh sure, they'll cut it loose, but that too will hurt them as it'll brick their stock prices (again) for at least a day.

Yeah, I can see that being an issue. Guess that's why wow has done so well for so long.

The problem with TOR is that the Star Wars fans didn't want a WOW clone, and the WOW fans didn't want a Star Wars game. They tried to marry two subsections of gamers and, predictably, ended up pleasing no one. Much like they're doing with most of their popular IP right now...

I probably belong to the first. I had hopes that Bioware might pull this off, considering their mostly spotless track record at the time. But I had my nagging doubts. Mmo in a title these days puts more of a dampener on my expectations than it succeeds at raising them. Will it be another Wow-clone or will it actually attempt to break new ground?
I enjoyed the class story, but everything else felt very familiar to me. It kept me invested for about two months before I just lost interest, as well as my real life friends who are all more or less SW-geeks. We formed a rp-guild just for this game, but after a while it just got rather bland.

F2P matters not, resume playing this game I will not!

Does this mean Blizzard can add another head to the wall of WoW challengers that have failed or is it too early?

WoW is f2p up to level 20.

That’s good to know haven’t played WoW in years..played a week for free.. then realized MMORPG’s are a lot of work. I’m frankly too lazy to get really involved especially if I have to pay a monthly fee…

Ya, I don't want to involve myself with World of WarCrack though. To be honest, I prefer games like Face of Mankind where the work you put in getting to know people and building up things is what you get.

Even the BBC covered it:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19077238

A drop below one million is pretty serious for such a massively expensive title but I think everyone had been predicting F2P after the relatively lukewarm reception and general lack of uptake... and just the fact the game itself is fairly lacking and that EA/Bioware's management of it has been awful from day one made it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What gets me is - why they're holding off until autumn, surely most people will just see "SWTOR F2P from..." and go "Guess I'll check that out later then.

The problem seems to be that everyone is setting out to TRY and make a WoW beater and to do that they're... trying to do EXACTLY what WoW does.

As many have said, WoW wasn't a perfect game when it launched and it took a period of adjustment for it to get good and I'd say it was a combination of factors that allowed it to achieve primacy - the fact Everquest had passed its zenith but there wasn't really any clear successor, that it was a Blizzard game (which guarantees a huge following) expanding on an established franchise and other things.

Needless to say, it didn't set out to be the next EverQuest... but then, I find the whole fixation on "WILL IT BE THE WoW BEATER!" rather tiresome and the attempts by the industry to try and "beat" WoW by producing a game that mimics it in as many ways as is possible just idiotic.

I just hope Planetside 2 is good.

This was sort of inevitable. Just another example of Bioware falling under their corporate masters... it is a shame.

I may actually play it again when it goes F2P. I have some characters and I do see that I will get some nice currency for being a Founder and two-three month player....

SWTOR Surrenders!!!! Five lessons learned as it goes free to play...

(If I link anymore of this guy's articles he should start giving me kickbacks)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2012/08/01/five-lessons-learned-as-swtor-surrenders/

I would be interested in SWOTR if it's f2p but after the ME3 mess...No thanks

I'd be sad, if this wasn't so funny

It is crazy how much money EA wasted on what will be seen as a failure. Here is the real irony, they would have probably made a profit if they would have just made KoTOR 3 and not the TORtanic.... As much as EA wants to move everything to multi-player, the fact that it would have done better as a single player game is very satisfying.

Too bad EA will learn nothing from this failure....

Which makes it even worse. If your MMO is a pretty decent single-player game, something went wrong.

Or you should have just made a single-player game in the first place!

Free to play, eh? I might pick up a copy after all then.

I'm not a die hard gamer - I have at least one of each class, but I don't play so much that I have gotten anything to level 50. So I'm still enjoying the game. I'll continue to pay to subscribe to it as long as it makes sense for me. I'm sad that it's going F2P, because again, I've enjoyed it, and it saddens me to see it declared a 'failure'. But, I hope that they're able to figure out a system that works and is profitable for them. Micro-transaction the living daylights out of the F2P people, if I can pay $15 to ignore that.