EA and Bioware will never make a profit with the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic, according to Bigpoint CEO Heiko Hubertz. Speaking at the London Games Conference, Hubertz said that micro-transactions were the only viable way to make money out of online gaming and that subscription-based games such as Bioware's forthcoming role-playing game had a huge mountain to climb in order to succeed.
According to Hubertz, who heads up one of the world's biggest free-to-play games sites, The Old Republic - which is rumoured to have cost in excess of $100 million to develop - would need over a million active subscribers over an extended period of time for EA to break even, but doubts that will actually happen. He also claimed that the subscription model was fundamentally flawed, stating that micro-transactions were the only real way to efficiently monetise an online game, providing it's done properly.
Heiko also believes the future of full-priced retail games could also be in jeopardy, claiming that huge games that cost millions of dollars to develop must make their money back within the first two to three months otherwise they're deemed a failure - and few games ever manage to achieve this.
