The sky isn't falling. A numbers based view.

Turbine laid off those employees because their work was done. Happens frequently when a developer releases a new expansion. All those people needed for coding and development are no longer needed. It's like seasonal help for developers. Why keep the lawn guys when it's winter?

cause someone needs to shovel the snow ?

It should, maybe SWTOR will be able to also make it 8+ years then.

Wasn't just the contract developers directly responsible for the RoR Expansion. They let go some longtime staff including some CM's that have been around for years.

There's no such thing as "Bioware", only Bioware EA which is simply a sub-division of EA - or to put it sucinctly just "EA" with Bioware tagged on.

ToR is doing fine and doing a lot better than Tera. GW2 the hype died faster than I though it would and has already peaked. Just too bad we won't know how much of a drop it took. Rift in all honesty I don't know how it is doing. Sounds like it got a lot better but then I hear most of the servers are barren. I think their expansion will bring in some peeps and have people re-sub too. I won't but just saying.

Once ToR goes f2p, a lot will be coming back along with new subs.

I will keep my sub here anyways but truth be told I wanted to get back into raiding and went back to WoW for MoP and I will say it is actually a fun expansion and end game. Well it is better than Cata so far and I will admit I was missing WoW because Cata was horrible. I just wish ToR's end game was harder and longer. I love their storyline for it and actually reminded me a little bit of how WoW's end game used to be where you felt the theme and the bosses weren't there after 2 trash pulls. But they just made them with too few bosses.

Either way ToR isn't going to die next year and will be around for a while. They will keep pumping out content and will get more subs out of going f2p imho.

Tera is tanking in west , because of bad partners here,,i think theyre doing fine back home

i cant believe that u still feed the poor noobs at BW the same lines

"SWtor is doing fine",,,really

"this game is for casuals",,,who dropped it like a hot potato

LOOK AT THE EFFING NUMBERS, BW,,,THAT SHOULD GIVE U A CLUE

Hate to break it to you but the post rate here is dropping pretty radically as well. Posts used to disappear off the first page in a couple of hours without constant replies, now... not so much.

This game is a year old now. It "failed" to live up to expectations and it hasn't been modified, tweaked, or changed in any significantly fundamental way. When F2P launches it will be the same game it was when it launched. That game did not knock anyone's socks off so why is there optimism of it being TOR's saviour?

It's no longer new. Yes, bug and feature-wise there have been improvements but this is the same game that failed to be a blockbuster a year ago. If the only thing that can salvage your product launch is to give it away for free, your product is not what people want.

It's been estimated that wow has sold over 40+ million units and only has about ~10 million active accounts. This is why that retention number is significant. If you can offer your product to an even larger audience then you stand to gain back customers and grow.

Unless somehow you believe the retention potential for this game is 0% which would be a strange thing to claim.

The retention potential has already been proven to be somewhere between 25-10%. If it jumps to 50% but most of them aren't paying, what use are they? They don't help the game and they don't help those of us who do pay.

F2P could be a saviour to a game that had a bad launch, such as DDO. F2P is a way to get people to try your game, if millions already tried it then it's not going to have the same affect.