When you embrace a free to play model you have to go all or nothing. If you want to turn your game into an exclusive pile of garbage then you do what EA and Bioware did and divide both the content and the players themselves. SWTOR's free to play model essentially breaks down to allowing players to do the bare bones content and not much more. You are restricted with experience, loot, PvP, and high grade equipment. To make this even more silly players are able to purchase items from a cash shop that lift some of these restrictions...for ten dollars a week. The game is a 14 dollar a month subscription. If that isn't the most counter intuitive business plan then I don't know what is.
The strategy here breaks down to making the free to play players feel so ostracized from the rest of the community that they are almost forced to subscribe. The only content allowed for free players is the basic story content and almost no end game material. Heck, you can't even use half of the stuff you'll acquire along the story.
For comparison you could look at AION's "Truly Free" model that restricts ZERO content and the cash shop exists simply to supplement the game-play experience rather than choke money out of an already dwindling player-base like SWTOR's.
Personally, I resubscribed to SWTOR earlier this week to get the dust off and play with some friends who were going to try the free model. Needless to say, our hopes were dashed quite quickly as we realized they couldn't even run PvP content or benefit from instances.
I find it hard to believe that the companies running MMOs like SWTOR would look around at the rampant success other companies are having with their F2P policies (NC West's Q3 earnings went up 426% when they switched AION and Lineage 2 to F2P) and just disregard them and still fail horribly.
I tried to love SWTOR, I did. I played to 50 at launch, did the whole SWTOR thing for a few months and then dropped it. EA has just delivered a series of upsetting failures resulting in an equally shoddy free model for a game they expected to be a hit without even bothering to look at the numerous ways they could have made it better.
2 comments:
I stopped at the point when I saw my money was gone cause of the cap and the only 2 action bars to use. Had such great hope cause I pretty much played from launch for like 7-8 months. This isn't really what I deserve.
I hear ya, my friends and I had extremely high hopes for F2P (We all play Aion currently) and were sorely disappointed at the money grubbing attitude that came along with the switch. EA/Bioware is not treating their players with a whole lot of consideration right now. They've priced things in a way that almost forces a subscription if you want to play the game in a meaningful way.
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