Tuesday, July 31, 2012

The Free Side of the Force

In February, EA announced that SWTOR had sold 2+ million copies and retained 1.7 million subscribers.  Executives claimed that 500,000 subscribers was the break-even point, and that "At a million, we'd be making a profit but nothing worth writing home about".

In May, they announced that the number was down to 1.3 million.  This was followed by two rounds of layoffs - the first rumored to be 40% of the staff - and mergers of 90% of the game's servers.

On today's conference call, EA described the numbers as below 1 million but "well north of" the 500,000 subscriber break-even point.   It's not clear whether any writing home took place, but they did end the lengthy and unusually public discussion of the game's business model by announcing that it will go free to play sometime around November. 

The Path to the Free Side
Just from the public and not especially hard numbers, we now know that the game has failed to retain over half of its customers and has almost certainly set an all-time record for fastest MMO to lose a million customers (in fairness, partially due to how few games have sold a million copy).  If you make up numbers of 2.1 million total copies sold and 700K current subscribers - which are completely fake but plausible given what we've been told - you're looking at more like two thirds attrition within six months. 

In response, they will be converting the game to a payment model that the studio heads had previously said would not support the scope of their product. Let's be clear, the studio didn't go bankrupt and leave the state of Rhode Island on the hook for a nine-digit bill.  Setting aside the connotations of the word "failure", reasonable people can agree that this was not the outcome that EA had in mind when they ponied up a nine-digit sum of money to have this game made. 

As I wrote last week, the game may be a victim of its times.  Non-subscription payment models are lowering the cost of switching games and may be diminishing the appeal of the repetitive mechanics that previously sustained subscriptions.  It's certainly possible that large numbers of copies were sold to non-MMO players - fans of Star Wars and/or Bioware's single player efforts - who were predisposed against paying a monthly fee.  Even so, the numbers EA cited today are staggering.  If 40% of players who quit cited the subscription on the survey and over a million players have quit, you're talking about potentially hundreds of thousands of votes specifically against the subscription. 

(If memory serves, you're required to complete the survey in order to cancel your subscription, obviously the impact of the number would be greatly reduced if I'm wrong and this step is optional.)

Outlook
The details are sparse, but the forthcoming SWTOR free to play model appears to be the industry standard for F2P conversions not owned by Turbine - no fees for content or the level cap, with restrictions on quality of life for non-subscribers (races, currencies, etc) and possibly a complete lock-out from endgame group content.  If the game's problem was that players were finishing the game's single player story and then quitting, I fail to see how a payment model that does not charge until players have completed the single player story is going to work out for them. 

While I personally will most likely pay less for SWTOR under the new model, I'm not celebrating.  SWTOR is a quality product, albeit one that may have been especially ill-suited for the subscription model.  The quality and direction of the game's future development, with the reduced staff and revised business model, are likely to suffer. 

More generally, if you are a subscription MMO that has been around for at least a year and you are not named WoW, Eve, Rift, or possibly Final Fantasy (the jury remains out on XIV after it launched so poorly that Square had to decline to charge for an entire year), you're either trying to retrofit a new payment model or abandoned in maintenance mode.  I get that there is more to the current MMO scene than the catastrophes of Copernicus and Prime and the disappointments like SWTOR and DCUO.  Even so, as someone who has very much enjoyed and benefited from playing in an era of multiple high profile MMO's, I can't say that I'm liking the way things are going.

6 comments:

  1. I kept meaning to buy the game and try it out, but ...

    I'm not ever going to pay two monthly subscriptions for any length of time. If I'd have bought SWOTOR, it would have been with the idea of determining whether I wanted to switch away from WoW.

    Bioware has let me down, four games in a row. Five? Seven? I don't know. It's been rough since the Baldur's Gate games, honestly. They seem to want different things out of games than I do.

    Ever since Lucas decided that Greedo shot first, I just can't bring myself to love Star Wars.

    Perfect storm of "meh" for me, here, is what I'm saying, but I'd lay odds that at least one of those three issues are relevant for a huge percent of the folks who might have turned this into a big, important MMO (in the same sense that WoW is important, anyway).

    If I'm going to dump WoW, it will be for something that sweeps me off my feet, not something where I have to fight off the meh.

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  2. Given how unimpressed I was with SW:TOR's beta, even once it has become F2P, I think I'd have to be pretty hard up for entertainment to even make the effort to download it.

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  3. I quit in March and was asked about one question (I think it was asking main reason why I canceled), before canceling. I was emailed a more in depth survey after the fact, so the numbers may not necessarily be from required surveys.

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  4. I prepaid so I never got an exit survey.

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  5. Derrill: If you stuck with WoW for practically a whole year in which they put out no (zero) content patches, then I think we can assume you're not that interested in new content or new games :)


    I hope a lot of people do try SWTOR out, it's a good quality game and their F2P offering is pretty generous. They're giving away the levelling content which is arguably the strongest part of the game anyway. On fleet last night, people were discussing whether they would unsub -- it's all around how much you really care about Ops and Warzones in endgame really. The people who were happily pottering around and just running the occasional Op probably won't want to pay £9pcm just for the Ops.

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  6. @Spinks, you may have a point :)

    I'm not hugely fond of starting over in any game ever, and Blizz seems to keep things interesting enough for me to not leave, even if that just means our casual guild is 6/8 deep in heroic modes, just for something to do.

    Doesn't hurt that I'm the rogue, and I got the orange daggers, I'll admit.

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