Realistically, do you think we will ever see an expansion?

Wow so many clueless people in this thread. SWTOR will have at least a few expansions over the course of its run. Even UO is still running and putting out expansions and that game is what 15 years old or older. Cannot remember the year it came out.

Do you work there and do you know their exact numbers? Do you know what their multi gen plan shows? What you have posted is nothing but conjecture at best. You don't even have any past experience or examples for the jury.

In fact, evidence says even the MMOs with sub 500,000 subscriber base produce expansion packs. Look around you. Stop posting nonsense just to draw attention to yourself.

If this was a mass failure like tabula rosa you might be right. But it's not...so....

Not anywhere I've seen. A lot of people quoting that level cap are doing so because Bioware did three surveys through a third party of the "would you pay $X for..." and one of the surveys mentioned a lvl 55 level cap. However, each survey had a different level cap, 52 and 53 were also asked about. The prices also varied between the three surveys, from $10 to $40.

It's possible, I've also heard rumor that the new planet is going to be huge. It would have to be to support 5 levels of gameplay. Personally, unless I find a dev mentioning it, I'm not assuming 55 is the new level cap.

Expansion, addon, patch, update. I don't care what they call it, I don't care what you define each thing as. As long as new content comes in the form of flashpoints, levels, quests, ops, events and gear at regular intervals, I don't need a so called expansion.

Why would I? Oh, because the others do it? Small regular updates > big and rare updates.

Absolutely yes.

The part that everyone forgets about is that the expansion box sales more than make up for the increase in the development team expenses when you launch an expansion.

SWTOR is far, far, from a financial disaster no matter how gloomy your outlook is on the game itself. It made back all of it's hugely unprecedented pre launch budget and made an immediate profit on it's initial retail sales alone. Every month after that it's made anywhere from 25 million to 7.5 million (top recorded sub numbers to lowest) per month gross depending on the number you want to estimate the current sub with.

Btw, 7.5 million a month is still 90 million a year in case those numbers are hard to fathom. Adding F2P to this makes it potentially even more lucrative.

So before you just jump in and foolishly claim they'd never do an expansion there are significant reasons why they would. An expansion means a box sale plus a jump in visibility on the market and at the very least a short term subscriber surge.

It also keeps your current audience entertained and playing your game while requiring as minimum a commitment to the cost as they want. The size of the expansion and internal deadlines set dictate the project costs and they can control all of that. This doesn't impact your live development either because it's standard to have different live teams and expansion teams that work concurrently on different areas of the game.

If there's anything Bioware can do well it's market the game. With a new product like an expansion, good marketing hype, and solid developer results all of a sudden that 25 million a month is obtainable again. Launch a new expansion like that every 12-18 months and the cash rolls in.

IF they throw out a real honest to goodness pay-for-a-box expansion it will probably be a last ditch attempt to save this game from being a complete money black hole for all parties involved. If they get lucky and start getting players back and maybe even sucker in a couple new ones it might even save the game.

My money is on this game going Tango Uniform long before LA/BW/EA drop another dime into developing a much-needed full blown expansion.

How ill informed you are. I just got three new players to get into the game, and they're enjoying it. Those three will bring in more, and so on, and so forth. Players may be bleeding, but new players are coming in. (And yes, these three players have seen endgame. They watched me play a few FPs and Ops, and some PvP). There will be an expansion, there'll be quite a few expansions.

To answer the guy I asked a question too:Blackavaar, honestly? Don't care how big WoW's dev team is, and I'm not being ill when I say this. I know Everquest's dev team is relatively small, and they're still churning out expansion packs pretty regular, infact, level cap is 100 now over there. This game has plenty of life left in it, what I don't understand is why the haters can't just go away (actual haters, not those with valid criticisms, there's a BIG difference), and do whatever game it is they wanna do.

Dude, I already answered this question. Considering all of their layoffs I can guesstimate the size of their current team based on what it was when they started development 5 years ago, and it's nowhere near the size of that one game that comes out with expansions (as in retail boxes that you have to pay extra money for and include major changes to the game world, not downloadable updates that include a few improvements that would normally be parsed out in a few monthly updates). No game other than that one big piece of panda crap still comes out with boxed expansions that I can find in any retail establishment.

I am doubtful that SWTOR will come out with any kind of boxed expansion within the next few years and I don't think it's even necessary. They can easily improve the game in all the ways everybody wants with regular updates. They don't need to put out new boxed expansions. If I am wrong I will eat my words, but until then I have as much right to espouse my opinion on these boards as you do.

TL/DR: Go bite yourself!

The distribution model doesn't mean anything. I never bought the boxed version of SWTOR, does that mean I didn't buy an actual game?

An expansion is a paid update that adds considerable content and generally new systems to the game. Whether it's a digital only purchase or not is irrelevant.

I agree with you undefined gentlebeing