It's been a tough journey for Star Wars: The Old Republic, with its popularity seemingly pingponging all over the place through its transition from subscription to free-to-play . But is free-to-play really a sustainable thing? Just how well has the MMO been doing? In an earnings call this week, EA president Frank Gibeau says that things are just dandy, thank you very much. Why, things are more than double the dandy, because that's how much revenue's gone up since the conversion.
As reported by Polygon , Gibeau was very optimistic about the MMO's future, given player numbers.
"Since it was induced in November, we've added more than 1.7 million new players on the free model to the service," he said. "And the number of subscriptions has stabilized at just under half a million. The really interesting thing that's happening inside the service right now is monthly average revenue for the game has more than doubled since we introduced the free-to-play option."
SWTOR first went free-to-play in November last year , and Gibeau says that EA and BioWare will continue to invest in new content every six weeks or so to maintain their player count.
It's been contentious amongst gamers, but this seems like another win for the free-to-play model—and personally, I'm a fan if it helps keep SWTOR's universe populated and constantly updated with fresh new things. How do you feel about it?
