Electronic Arts and BioWare have spent almost a hundred million dollars developing Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, but Heiko Hubertz, CEO of browser games publisher Bigpoint, doubts that they'll be able to recoup that money, let alone make profit on the game.
"If you look in the traditional industry there are still a lot of big bets there," he said during his London Games Conference keynote. "Still there are companies investing $20-40 million for a game. These companies have to be profitable after one or two months. They don't have 12 months or even more. I think these companies are really in trouble in the future if a user can play online games for free."
"If you look at a game like Star Wars from EA and BioWare, they estimated a development budget of more than $100 million. This is an online game for many millions of subscribers, so a big publisher does not understand that a subscription model is not the future."
"With micro-transactions and longer lifetime maybe I see a chance for this game but I don't think that EA or BioWare will be profitable with this game," Hubertz concluded. "Ever."
Several high profile MMO games - such as Lord of the Rings Online and Champions Online - have switched to the free-to-play model over the last few years after facing a large decline in their subscribers count.
