Well, some sneaky snakes decided to dig into the ToS of the SW:TOR beta recently and came up with some interesting information. I found out about this from Kill Ten Rats, so kudos to them for being attentive-like.
Here’s the snippet from the beta agreement:
(I) You acknowledge and agree that all items acquired for points during the Game Program are non-refundable and non-tradable.
(K) You acknowledge and agree that BWA reserves the right to change/add/remove points rewarded in the Game store at any time and without warning.
(M) You acknowledge and agree that points acquired during the Game Program cannot be saved up for or used in the commercial version of the Game.
Suzina does an excellent job of asking the important questions so I’ll leave that to her. For my part, I’ve had an inkling that micro-transactions might be in the game for some time. Ever since Riccitiello let it slip back in December, to be exact.
“We are continuing to stick to the plan relative to building out our direct-to-consumer models which include microtransactions and subscriptions,” said EA CEO John Riccitiello in a conference call today. “The recent launch of Warhammer [Online] is a great example of that.”
“Other initiatives we’ve announced, for example [the] Star Wars online MMO, are mid-session games which are microtransaction-based,” he continued. “You’ll be hearing more about those in the February [conference] call.”
Like Heartless, I’m not as shaky on this business model as I used to be. DDO and Free Realms have shown that it can be done and well. The only thing I’d hope is that they either make it F2P with micro-transactions, or, make the transactions cosmetic only. There’s a lot of hype built up around this game, so I don’t doubt that Bioware and EA are thinking about these things already, so I’m not too worried about it. It will be interesting to see what model the wind up going with.
