Why Star Wars: The Old Republic Failed

with all the imrpovements they made in the past 3 months and finally putting it in the f2P setting, I see no reason why TOR will not go on at this point.

Free to Play is also not a death march for everything either. Sometimes it works better than a paid model, which barely works at all int he current MMO market. That, plus saturation, is more of a factor of it going down. Hell, WoW went F2P for 20 levels to catch new players, and is still going somehow because of end-game content, not beginning-game content. That is the difference basically, people guilding it up at the end-game when ea miscalculated how long it would take people to get there in TOR.

With that either fixed or being fixed, I don't see this dying anytime soon. It won't kill WoW, but it will stay in the game, the investment is too high now.

Well, you are right in some respects, but honestly that is irrelevant in the end other than to lament on it.

Fact of the matter is WoW will always be on top. People can aim for it but this expectation that it can be a WoW killer is a media myth that developers and consumers buy into. That, coupled with a saturated market as it is, makes it impossible for anything to hit the numbers they expect.

TOR will only fail when its servers shut down. Until that happens, they just didn't meet their goal.

It'll die. I played it out of boredom for a long time, but didn't even enjoy it, for however long I played it during Wrath, I never enjoyed playing it anymore. Sure, I liked it for awhile at first, and played it off and on from vanilla to wrath, but I finally found something else to waste my time with that I actually enjoyed (LoL) but how the hell people can STILL play it is beyond me. Especially as many that do. Will GW2 kill WoW? Probably not. Will WoW continue to slowly run out of gas and eventually die? Yes.

Jonathan Leack master of MMO's yet has never ever ever played with me...

PFFT causing the world to explode is nothing to worry about especially if its from sheer awesomeness

Good article. People will debate whether or not going f2p is a failure and I say it is. There are some games that are designed from the beginning as f2p and they keep things reasonable. Other games that tack it on because their sub model didn't cut it use it as a cash grab free for all where they sell anything and everything (coughlotrocough) Since the CEO of EA himself once pondered charging BF player $1 to reload in online games, I'm guessing swtor will fall in the latter camp. Just a complete disaster all the way around.

www.nerfnow.com/comic/808

I'm still gonna play the game when it becomes free to play. But we are all thinking it this very moment, why was there subscriptions in the first place? Probably to lie to ourselves when we are faced wit hall the flaws mention in this article.

The dev lied to the people in beta saying the high res textures that were there in beta wernt there and that they were secretly medium textures all along. Then they baked DRM into the engine(which lucasarts forced them to so people could try to use the textures) and continued to lie about it saying it wasn't in there. You could even force the game to pull up better textures in cutscenes. Then they continued to advertise video and screenshots with the high res textures that you arnt allowed to turn on in the game. They didn't finally give the high textures back till the end of march and still without a apologie they just acted like it was something new.

So for me the biggest reason I didnt buy a subscription was I cant stand a developer that outright bold face lies to there customers/fanbase/testers. Its part of the reason im up in arms about gw2 not keeping there dx10 promise(they have been way better at other communication though)

I wont even get into the boring parts of the mmo

p.s. no good anti aliasing. shitty shadows. bnlahdladsaf asdfdasf *has died from stress and betrayal induced brain aneurysm from bioware.*

couldnt sit on benches and such was kinda odd at well x-x

You're confusing the reply button for your enter button

The first post I couldn't fit any more characters in.

I can't help but feel that it would have been a huge hit if it had been f2p at launch, flaws included. The Star Wars name alone would have brought in a ton of casual MMOers who wouldn't have cared about the lack of endgame or the other problems. Unless a game is the second coming, subscription fees will continue to scare people away.

Agreed. I REALLY believe that free to play is the next step in online gaming. It is in community building that developer and publisher will have to make the effort to produce profit. Not with high end technology, but with just a good response to the feedback and rewarding the loyal players.

Biggest flaw: It wasn't KOTOR 3.

No, the biggest flaw was that is WAS KOTOR 3. It was a single player game that you occasionally saw other players, or if you were lucky, had a friend to log in and play with you.

That's probably the only reason I liked SWTOR and thought it was worth my money. KoToR III was all I ever wanted from them, and I got it.

The saddest part about it's failure is that the KOTOR brand is now going to be shelved, and I'm still waiting on what could be a truly epic KOTOR 3.

You should play SWTOR then...it pretty much is KoToR III. Just pretend that's what it is and treat it as such instead of an MMO, and you'll get what you're looking for.

So any game which fails to meet WOW's awesome numbers is a fail? One thing many people forget about WOW was that it wasn't just an MMO it was a community of RTS players who had their game turned into an interactive world. In essence Blizzard capitalized on over a decade of loyal players who enjoyed Warcraft and thus dominated the MMO market. Expecting SWTOR to be competitive to be relatively close as far as customers was and is unrealistic. While Star Wars is a great license none could argue that SONY tarnished the brand. It will remain a good license and when the game matures it will probably be one of the top games. The bottom line is MMO's have issues and they resolve them as they mature. Even WOW wen't through it's vanilla phase. While I agree that SWTOR has vast room for improvement I can't say I find your expectations to be realistic.

So Star Wars doesn't have a community of diehard fans who may also be gamers? I don't believe the RTS players were the ones who were a majority that supported WoW.

WoW was a complete revolution in the MMO market, they simply got it right. WoW was that game that when it started getting huge in popularity, you could walk down your dorm hall and find the whole spectrum of people playing the game. People who didn't even play video games played WoW. I've had WoW in common with more people than I can name, some of whom I wouldn't have expected to play video games, let alone an MMO.

WoW is quite possibly the most mimic'd MMO in history. There is a reason for that and I don't think it's the RTS players.

All I wanted was KoToR III, so I got what I wanted from the game. Played almost entirely solo, which isn't very MMO-like, but I enjoyed it. I don't know if I'll play it when it goes F2P. In my mind I already beat it, and I didn't treat it like a MMO at all, so we'll see.

i love this game and never had any problem with it other than all the side quests being shared per faction. i never thought that the game was unresponsive it seemed fine to me but when i went and played WoW i found that the combat was super unresponsive for me.

Wasn't really a 'failure' column, it was just a list of complaints. If you look at the influx of players and revenue that DDO and LOTRO made from going free to play, you can see it's a valid subscription platform. In this economic climate, it's folly to produce an MMO with a subscription system, but free to play games are becoming much more prevalent. (I'm looking at you, The Secret World.) The complaint that 'I got to 50, now what', should be reserved for people who play the game for 30+ hours a week. My husband and I listened to all the dialog, followed our characters storylines, dabbled into PvP, and explored each planet in detail to find data entries, and got to areas where we could spot the train of speedleveling characters whizz by while we found unique monsters with neat loot in the middle of nowhere. It's like a cheesecake. If you have a piece every so often, it lasts quite a good amount of time, but if you just horf the thing down in one sitting, then you can't really complain

(continued) that there isn't any cheesecake left. The game will continue to grow as most MMO's do over time, and the free to play influx will give them the income they need to stabilize it. You can't look at WoW as a comparison to anything, as it's like comparing a Fortune 500 company to a local corporation that is just starting up. I wouldn't call it a blunder, or a failure, but there were some oversight issues with EA, but don't fault BioWare for that.

I ended up writing much more than I should, I really just wanted to say: THEY'RE NOT IMPERIAL STORMTROOPERS, DAMN IT.