When the game was announced, there were whispers that went through the grapevine about what the payment structure was going to be. Would you be paying a flat $15.00 a month fee like you have to do when you play WoW? Or, would there be the dreaded microtransaction that allowed for you to play for free, but as you got more and more serious and wanted to get more gear and the such, you had to start paying more and more.

I say dreaded to describe this method of payment because, quite frankly, it really is dreaded. I don’t want to have to start spending an arm and a leg to pay for a game that I figured would follow the same route as World of Warcraft had when it came to payment. With there being rumors that it is going to be microtransaction, there are quite a few that are frustrated at the idea of it. Why would anyone want to pay small chunks of change to play a game?

So, I stepped back and took my emotions out of the picture and I tried to figure out what would be the logic behind microtransactions and it dawned on me that it might be a very beneficial system, but still not one I support. First and foremost, you have the possibility to play the game for free and if you suddenly see something you really want, you fork over the arbitrary amount of, say, $10.00. So, you’ve been playing for two months and suddenly, you realize that you want a single piece of gear and fork over the $10.00.

That’s great because you’ve saved $20.00. That’s cool. But, what about the player who decides that in the first month, he or she wants to spend $100.00 on cool gear and things of that sort. Suddenly you have a tremendous slant leaning towards the spoiled teenager rather than the player like me who can’t possibly afford to be as strong as any player who has a strong bank account to play with.

I can see one reason why I would support microtransactions and that’s because, according to some studies, it actually provides more money for the company. Arguably, if there is more money for the company, there is more expendable income to try and churn out more and more content. Like I’ve already said, I’m all about the story. So, if there’s a way to get more story faster and better story, I’m for it.

But, I really don’t think that microtransactions is the way to go. Sure, it’ll bring in more players, but the thing that EA and BioWare have to keep in mind is that people are signing up for TOR when it is payable through microtransactions because it is free. So, if they have in their mind the mentality of free, they’re not going to buy gear. It is the person who is willing to pay $15.00 a month who is going to buy gear. So, you might actually lose money because there are so many more people on your servers.

In the end, I can’t make the decision for the company. But, if I was EA and BioWare, I’d ask yourself why World of Warcraft was able to succeed so much and now make so much money. You look at the amount of people they have (over eleven million) and you realize that the amount they take in each month is tremendous. Yes, the number really is one hundred and sixty five million dollars. That’s a lot of pay checks each month. So, there must be something going right with the pay per month basis.