How does SWTOR Free-to-Play Reflect the Modern MMO World

So Star Wars: The Old Republic has gone free-to-play, at least up to a point, and that leaves the MMO industry in a very interesting position. The Old Republic looked to be one of the last big AAA MMOs, one of those games that looked to make or break the massively multiplayer world by injecting an influx of new players into our community and ultimately benefit everybody. Instead it’s been successful enough, but not to the level some people expected. It’s not been a “WoW-killer,” it’s not changed the face of the industry. No doubt it’s been a financial success and a critical success, but given that it’s a Bioware game and it had a ton of advertising, what does it say about the MMO genre that it isn’t the biggest game on the market today? What does it say that people have already moved onto other games, or back to World of Warcraft?

Successful, but not Succeeded

First, let’s just clarify once again that I have no doubt that The Old Republic has been a success. If anything, I’d say that opening up the first levels of the game to everybody is a result of massively successful open weekends, not an act of desperation on behalf of a failing developer. It doesn’t stop it from being an interesting topic of discussion though, because when the game first came out the developers were adamant that no portion of the game would ever, nor needed to be, free-to-play. So it leaves the question, what made them change their mind? Were they overconfident in their marketing for the game? Did they not understand the MMO market as a whole, focusing too much on competing with the likes of World of Warcraft? Is it as simple as a free-to-play “demo” always being on the cards, but not wanted to announce it for fear of putting of early buyers?

Where Have all the Jedi Gone?

A little over two months  ago, it was reported on by several outlets that 400,000 people had left The Old Republic; that was just under a quarter of the user base, a huge amount considering that the amount of registered users had been constantly going up for almost 6 months. I suppose there are lots of reasons that might happen – it’s probably fair to say that almost everybody who subscribed for the entirety of those 6 months had finally seen everything they could possibly see in the game and decided to back off until the first expansion was released. That’s on top of natural turn over and in direct competition with the fact that Bioware are no longer advertising the game on every gaming site the web over. They left as more people were trailing the game in the free weekends, of which there have been many. But why didn’t the people playing for free decide to keep going after their trial was up?

The truth about Free-To-Play vs. Pay-To-Play

Let’s face it, there are hundreds of absolutely stunning free-to-play games on the market today and there’s no way that anybody with a healthy life can possibly ever play them all. I make a living out of playing games, and there’s still no chance I could play them all. So when a user base with that much content at their fingertips decides not to pay a subscription, it’s probably down to a perceived lack of value. Let’s look at it from a real world perspective: I wouldn’t pay $15 a month on chocolate biscuits if I could get them free (with the occasional donation if I get an especially good batch). Those $15 biscuits would need to offer far above what is currently available at the bakers where I get mine free, and there’s just not that much difference. The Old Republic might be great for a free weekend, but paying to play indefinitely is a big deal, especially when there are so many other games on the market that may or may not deserve as much play time and as much money.

Will Going Free-to-Play Help?

The question I suppose is whether this will make any difference whatsoever? Personally, I don’t think so, not a big enough difference that it’ll change the fortunes of the developers entirely. Some people, people who didn’t get to play over one of the free weekends for whatever reason, will now be able to play whenever they want up to level 15. Of those people, some will decide to stick around and that’s make the numbers look a little healthier for a little while. There will also be an influx of trial players who have played it before but didn’t get to put any time into it, but all of this isn’t exactly going to fix the problem. It’s a band aid at best, a way of fighting dwindling numbers.

Level 15?

I think the biggest tell in this whole thing is that Bioware have limited the trial to level 15. After that, you’ll need to pay up if you want to continue playing. That’s very similar to what World of Warcraft have been doing for a while, and the giving in to this demo seems like an act of competition. To top that, going fully free-to-play would cost quite a lot of money while the developers put new systems into place and may not pay off, but the answer as to whether it’s the only option remaining to Bioware will come after they’ve measured how well the game copes under the new free-to-play banner.

SWTOR free to play
Conclusion

The MMO world is changing and the proof is in the Wookie Pudding. Five years ago, Star Wars The Old Republic wouldn’t have changed its model and, to be honest, it probably wouldn’t have needed to. Today there are far too many games on offer and The Old Republic, Star Wars and Bioware or not, is just one of them, and the guys behind the pricing need to decide if they can offer more than the average free MMO. The answer is that they can’t, not massively, and so they either need to boost their content, change their systems (the battle system was so MMO-ish, I could have been playing anything) or change their price. We’ll see what happens over the coming months, both in terms of how the game changes and how the subscription numbers flux.