SWTOR free-to-play is difficult, we still bet on it

There’s recently been some talk from BioWare concerning Star Wars: The Old Republic and free-to-play, something that can only point toward a plan to eventually relaunch SWTOR as a F2P game.

Now it’s BioWare’s James Ohlen that admits to PC Gamer that free-to-play is as good a business model as subscription – it’s much better actually, we might add – but there are some doubts on whether it could work for SWTOR.

Ohlen says that games that were developed as free-to-play from the very beginning will definitely work out and others that transferred from subscription-based to F2P are also doing well. At this point we feel tempted to ask ‘so, what’s your problem then?’ but Ohlen ends by saying that it’s not something super easy to do.

Turbine might disagree on that, having transferred both The Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online to free-to-play with massive success, radically increasing player base and revenue. We believe that BioWare has all the necessary skills to do such a thing, so they’re either denying it so that the subscriptions don’t decline too fast or they’re already making a nice marketing stunt for a future F2P relaunch.

Until something like that happens, players will soon be able to enjoy SWTOR for free up to level 15.