SWTOR Goes Free-To-Play

This is a look at the upcoming changes to Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Channel 2 Games: http://www.youtube.com/channel2tgn

Massively has been covering the Free to Play movement in MMORPGS extensively.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/08/02/ask-massively-welcome-to-here-edition/#continued

Here’s some of what they had to say about the reality of the MMORPG payment model.

f you follow MMO news at all, you probably caught the fact that Star Wars: The Old Republic is going free-to-play this fall. This is news only in the most abstract sense of the word. Seriously, it’s been three years since Dungeons & Dragons Online made the switch. Basically every title in the world has now converted over and found out that F2P is more or less a license to print money. Free-to-play is not the future of MMOs; free-to-play is the right now and has been for a while.

This week’s installment of Ask Massively does not cover free-to-play conversions, but as you all know, I’ve never been a fan of strongly linking the opener to the rest of the article. No, this week we’re talking about Blade & Soul. If you’ve got a question for a future installment of the column, leave it in the comments below or mail it to [email protected]. Questions may be edited slightly for clarity and/or brevity.

Alice1 asked: When is NCsoft going to release that babe of a game Blade & Soul in English?

 Not this year, definitely. It’s possible that the studio will opt out of releasing it here altogether, as it happens.

This year is a given; the game is still in testing over in Korea (albeit the sort of testing that might as well be release), and there’s no way that NCsoft wants to draw attention away from Guild Wars 2. If it’s going to see a US release, it will be next year… which might also be the point at which WildStar is gearing up for release.

The last time that NCsoft spent a lot of money to bring a game over to the US market, that game was Aion.Aion didn’t do badly for itself, but it certainly wasn’t a breakout crossover hit. So if you’re counting cost, there’s a case to be made for potentially leaving the game as a curio in its native country, especially when the Korean and US markets have switched their business model preferences.

It’s not a given. But at the moment, there’s no indication that the game is coming over. That will hopefully change as it did for Phantasy Star Online 2, but it’s not a certainty.

DIRECTOR’S CHANNEL
http://www.youtube.com/jt33gaming

Music: “Night Owl” by Broke For Free

Click “Like” and “Favorite” if you like this video. Helps us make more!