BioWare On Building Star Wars MMO: Our Respect For Blizzard Has GrownStar Wars: The Old Republic will be the very first MMO title from the talented RPG developers at BioWare. Like the top dog in the space, World of Warcraft, SWTOR will be a subscription-based game and it could potentially take some market share from WoW this holiday season. BioWare has learned a lot during the game's development, and BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk told IndustryGamers that, if anything, his respect for what Blizzard has accomplished has only grown having seen what it takes to build an MMO.
"It’s interesting, because at shows, you don’t see a lot of [MMOs]. I think that’s because they’re big, they’re hard to make, they’re daunting. I think one thing you can say we’ve absolutely learned is, we’ve always respected Blizzard a lot, and I think our respect probably has grown after seeing just how challenging it is to make one of these games," remarked Zeschuk. "So we’re nearing the finish line, we have thousands of people testing it... We’re getting ready to launch it - It’s got great potential. I think the interest is there. The quality is there. We’re making sure the service is good and then we’ll see what happens."
"[Lapsed WoW players are] actually very open to MMOs and they’re a great potential audience for us."
We asked Zeschuk more generally to weigh in on the evolving MMO space and what lessons they've learned observing it all these years that they can apply now to make SWTOR a great experience.
"I think there’s a whole bunch of interesting dimensions. One is obviously, there’s the continued success of WoW, but it’s also been up for a while. There’s actually a lot of people that have played it that aren’t playing it right now and they’re actually very open to MMOs and they’re a great potential audience for us," he said, noting BioWare's hope to capitalize on lapsed WoW players.
And while Zeschuk acknowledges the fast-growing "freemium" market, he believes that sort of business model is more appropriate when you're dealing with an unknown as opposed to a huge brand like Star Wars.
"The free to play space is picking up steam, and it’s a great business model. I can play for free and if I want to monetize I can. It doesn’t actually preclude other business models. It’s particularly good in scenarios where you want to create awareness and you want to create trial and people aren’t committed, but you take something like the biggest entertainment product in the world, Star Wars, you don’t tend to have an awareness problem or a trial problem," he said.
Zeschuk stated that the key to a successful MMO is customer retention of course: "What we’ve learned is that the real value of the space is actually having a long term, enduring customer. And that happens by making, first off, a great game. You have to make a great game with the right content and social features - that’s our intention, to make people want to play for a long time. We offer a great service. We have a lot of people who’ve actually run gaming services for more than a decade; they’re actually on our team, and so having those people on board to actually help us launch our service and make sure that’s reliable and secure is very, very important," he continued.
The other part of retaining customers deals with expanding gameplay through downloads and new worlds, making sure top notch content is just a click away. "The ongoing plan for content and actually delivering new things and making people really see that we’re investing in it is very important, we’ll continue to invest in [SWTOR]. It’s a long term game that’ll change and evolve and will continue to become more interesting. And for us, on our side, we'll be using our telemetry to respond to what they’re doing and what they’re playing," added Zeschuk.
We'll be very curious to see how SWTOR performs. BioWare knows how to craft compelling experiences, but the MMO space is a tough one to get a foothold in.
