For those who don’t know SWTOR is a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) set in the star wars universe. Thousands of players play with and against one another in this huge digital space. To put things into perspective, most high quality (known as AAA) games cost around $300,000. SWTOR was estimated to cost between $150 million and $200 million. Within the first month alone they had nearly a million subscribers. But since that successful launch the game has been slowly bleeding subscribers. This is the reason for the switch.
So why is this free to play model so popular? Why is everyone switching over to it?
It’s all about the money. These games, more than almost any other, are built to take in revenue because they take a a serious investment in capital and time. At Champlain we had a visit from the president of Turbine who explained it all with a single set of graphs.
The first, is the subscription based model. As you can see the target market is ultimately restricted to a select audience who is willing to invest in paying a subscription fee. Many gamers, myself included, refuse to pay for a game more than once. We are represented in the white section on the left. On the right is a more casual audience, who might be interested in playing, but would do irregularity and not enough to justify the subscription cost. So as the graph illustrates, the game only services a particular audience.
The graph below illustrates a free-to-play model, which obviously hits a larger audience. Not only does the game target those who are interested in playing an MMO, but the other two who didn't want to pay the subscription fee.
This ultimately leads to more revenue, the more people playing your game, the higher the potential someone is willing to spend money on it. In a free to play model, all sales are made either through purchasing the game in the first place, that initial $60 or through in-game purchases that unlock content. This way of revenue generation is known as a freemium model.
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