F2P or you’ll be “skating up hill” – Cryptic.
World of Warcraft has “sucked the oxygen” from the subscription market: that’s why the tide is turning towards free-to-play. And the only game with enough clout to compete is BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic.
“You’re skating up hill if you don’t offer a free-to-play option,” Cryptic Studios head Jack Emmert told Eurogamer. “You’re skating up against World of Warcraft and theoretically SWTOR. That’s your competition. And unless you think your games are as good or better than those – because you also have to overcome their reputation – it’s going to be highly unlikely a large number of people, meaning 200,000-plus, are going to be willing to subscribe to your game. And a lot of companies are making $50-60-70 million bets, and I just don’t see that there’s a market for their products.”
He added: “I don’t foresee anything toppling those [WOW and SWTOR] at the moment. You either build-big or go home; you have to spend at least $50 million on your product, and even then it’s a basic proposition. When you come out, you’ve got to not only beat World of Warcraft as it was when it launched, you’ve got to beat all the developments it has had since then. That’s really, really hard.”