Posted by Lethality in News | 3 Comments
Free To Play? Not For The Old Republic.
Joystiq has a short interview with BioWare Co-Doctor’s Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka centered primarily around the idea of the free-to-play subscription model. As before, the BioWare Co-Founders deflect any notion that Star Wars: The Old Republic is headed that way, only this time they expand that it isn’t even necessarily a good thing.
In regards to available resources for development and expansion, Zeschuk put it like this:
“I’m not saying it’s better or worse. It just doesn’t supplant the other things. ‘Cause we can do some things no one else can,” Zeschuk added. In his eyes, a free-to-play dev isn’t able to throw the same amount of resources and time at an MMO project, and that marks a big differentiation between the two business models. “The free-to-play people can’t invest to the level we can invest, and can’t create something of the size and scale of something we can create,” he said. The idea that free-to-play will take over all other MMO business models, he said is, “from a business perspective, ridiculous.”
For my money, I tend to agree with him. Lowering the price can only take you so far. Look at Dell as compared to Apple. It’s better to deliver a premium value and charge accordingly. Anyone can compete on price. Few can compete on quality. You can only cut off so many limbs before it ceases to function.
While not TOR-related, perhaps the most interested point in the piece led to the revelation that there might be an older BioWare IP surfacing in the free-to-play arena soon:
“You can re-imagine things and kinda envision them in different ways,” he said of the business model’s advantages. “We have some other stuff we haven’t announced yet coming from our play-for-free team that I’m really excited about. It’s gonna bring back some IP that people have a lot of fond memories around.”
Interesting.
Head on over to Joystiq for the full read!
The Co-Doctors!
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I am finding it a little annoying to read articles like the one above. The game has been fully online (not to include early access) for just over a week, and people are asking about whether or not it should be free-to-play? Why is that even being considered at this point?
If it went Free, I would not play.
The game is the same old MMO with voice acting thrown in. I’m sorry I really wanted to like this game, I played beta and loved it about the first month in but after the newness wore off, so did its appeal. Now my overpriced collectors edition will collect dust in my attic. I can only hope that Guild Wars 2 doesn’t disappoint.