Don’t Shut Down Star Wars Galaxies, George Lucas!

We know Star Wars the Old Republic must be promoted. It’s normal. We know it’s not good to have two Star Wars games fighting each other for the same market.

But that’s precisely the point: these games are not aiming for the same market. In fact, no other game is offering such a good space simulator, where we can roam free and explore the space. Bioware’s SWTOR, while a great game, certainly doesn’t. The two games are not aiming for the same player skills, not for the same player base.

We all know many players were angry after the CU and the NGE modified the game play. But this is already history. This happened in 2005, while most players left in 2009 - years later! But guess what: most of the games lost subscribers in 2009 and since then. It’s the economy, guys! And they found a way to survive, and to continue to serve their player base. Big titles, like Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons, City of Heroes, are now free to play. So is Anarchy Online, a classic SF MMO. Even EVE Online introduced recently an item mall. These are hard economic times for everyone. Maybe the 15$/month, the industry standard, is becoming too expensive? Even Ford and General Motors were able to offer better deals to their customers; why is the gaming industry thinking they should continue to live in their old pink bubble? So why do you want to shut down SWG? Nobody even tried to save it yet!

When we buy a single player game, it’s ours. It’s in our home. No matter how old it is, we can always play it. No company can come and take it away. But with online games, things are different: we pay for the game, we also pay a monthly subscription, we pay for expansions, and we pay for special items. We pay a lot. And after we gave a lot of money to that company, they can decide at any moment to shut down the servers and say goodbye. That leaves us with a nice colored box and a useless game. So, why do we still pay so much money? Because we trust those companies. Because honesty is the best policy. Because you can’t fool the people twice. Because there is something called loyalty to the customers.

And that’s exactly what we ask now from Sony Online Entertainment and LucasArts: loyalty. Is it too much to ask?