14 DAY TRIAL // The recent drop in subscription numbers for Star Wars: The Old Republic might be a bad sign to analysts, but the Electronic Arts leadership believes that it will be working on the MMO for a long time, delivering more content and new ways to enjoy the game.
Frank Gibeau, who is the leader of the EA Games publishing label, spoke to Games Industry and said, “MMOs, obviously, are a big commitment of time and money and so giving people an opportunity to access it for free, try it, we found in our telemetry and our experiments is a really good strategy and a good tactic.”
“We’re going to do that. We also announced a… mass amount of content that’s coming for the service, so we’re going to be in the Star Wars business for ten years, who knows?” he added.
He used Ultima Online, which Electronic Arts has been working on it for seventeen years, as an example of how a strong MMO can survive the evolution of the genre and keep an audience interested in the long term.
Gibeau says, “We’re still playing Dark Age of Camelot, we’re still playing Warhammer, we’re still playing Ultima Online, we’re still playing Runescape, we’re still playing Lineage.”
Star Wars: The Old Republic was launched in late 2011 and since then the developers at BioWare have released two core updates and implemented a number of events like the Rakghoul Plague.
During E3 2011 the team revealed that in 2012 gamers would get access to an entire new planet, where the main enemies will be a Hutt cartel who is trying to take over the galaxy.
The MMO will also deliver high-level raids for groups and a number of Warzones for those who are more interested in Player versus Player experiences.
A quest chain will also allow players to get a new companion, the HK-51 assassin droid.