The great Word of Warcraft killer? Perhaps not quite reports Ars Technica.
In an investor note released today, Cowen and Company analyst Doug Creutz said he suspects that subscription levels for The Old Republic may already be lower than the 1.7 million EA reported in February. Creutz’s primary piece of evidence for this belief is publicly available server population numbers assembled and reported by TORstatus.net. These figures have shown a roughly 10 percent decline over the last two months. That doesn’t necessarily mean the game has lost 10 percent of its subscribers in that time, of course, but it isn’t really a sign of strong player growth, either.
I’m, unfortunately, one of those subscribers who canceled their TOR subscription. For the first month or so, I was greatly enjoying the game playing through as a smuggler. The first three worlds were a delight but the problem came when I got to the fourth world I visited. It was pretty much a carbon copy of the third. By this point I was growing a little tired of the recycled dialog, battle mechanics, and fetch quests.
The Old Republic might be a neat Star Wars-skinned MMO, but it just can’t escape being a bit too much of a grind for me. Those hoping that Bioware somehow managed to squeeze a Knights of the Old Republic experience into the game didn’t get quite what they were looking for.
You know, I haven’t played the game, but I had kind of predicted that there would be some issues. If I had played, it would have been as a smuggler, but the issue kind of, how do you pull a smuggler into this conflict and how do you keep them in it once the incentive is gone? From what I’ve heard, they managed to do the first but not the second.
I hate to say it, but my initial reaction to the game was, “I wonder how long it will be before it ends up as free-to-play?”
I love a lot of what they’ve done with it, don’t get me wrong, but after I got burned on DC Universe Online going F2P after just about 6 months, I just didn’t have the faith to believe that this wouldn’t.