14 DAY TRIAL // The developers working on Star Wars: The Old Republic are keen to keep the game subscription-based and believe that there are enough players interested in the MMO genre to power the success of their own product, market leader World of Warcraft and competitors like Rift.
James Ohlen, the game director working on Star Wars: The Old Republic, has told IGN that, “There is a place for subscription-based games and if you’re going to build a subscription-based game it’s got to be huge in scope.
“People have to feel that it’s worth paying a subscription fee every month, so the scope of the game has to be much bigger than the free-to-play games. The quality, the polish has to be very, very high, and then you need to have a plan to continue to deliver free content on a regular basis.”
He added, “If you do those things, I think you can succeed as a subscription-based game. Obviously, there can only be a few subscription-based games. There is a limited MMO audience and not a ton of that audience is playing more than one MMO, but I still think there’s room for more than just one really successful online game.
“I think Star Wars: The Old Republic can coexist with World of Warcraft and other successful games like Rift.”
The developer also believes that keeping the quality of the experience high in the long term is a requirement for constant success.
BioWare has declared its commitment to The Old Republic by opening a dedicated support center in Ireland, which will only handle the support element for the MMO while also creating dedicated teams to deliver more game content and polish the mechanics.
At the moment, BioWare is working on yet another significant content patch for The Old Republic while also developing another set of game mechanics that will be introduced before the end of spring 2012.