EA plan on being in the SWTOR business "for a long time"

EA's Frank Gibeau has said one of the ways the firm plans on attaining and retaining more players in Star Wars: The Old Republic is by offering the free trial, continuing to improve the gameplay, and by adding more content. This, he said, proves the firm plans to be in the "in the Star Wars business for a long time."

Speaking with GI International, Gibeau said the free trial announced during E3 will provide players who haven't tried the MMO the opportunity to make a commitment.

"MMOs, obviously, are a big commitment of time and money and so giving people an opportunity to access it for free, try it, we found in our telemetry and our experiments is a really good strategy and a good tactic," he said. "We're going to do that. We also announced a... mass amount of content thats coming for the service, so we're going to be in the Star Wars business for ten years, who knows?

"We're still publishing Ultima Online for seventeen years. So we're definitely going to be in the Star Wars business for a long time and if the business changes in accordance with how the market is reacting, then that's just good process for us since we're trying to create the best possible service for our gamers.

"We're still playing Dark Age of Camelot, we're still playing Warhammer, we're still playing Ultima Online, we're still playing Runescape, we're still playing Lineage. What's beautiful about an MMO is that when you get to a certain scale it stays with the program for a long time."

Earlier today, it was reported that Star Wars: The Old Republic lead designer Emmanuel Lusinchi said BioWare was looking at the free-to-play competition to see if such a move would be right for SWTOR in the future. Gibeau also touched upon the subject briefly with GI.