When bad things happen, everyone has an opinion on why. This week Trion Worlds CEO Lars Buttler shared his thoughts on what went wrong with the downfall of 38 Studios and BioWare’s MMORPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) in an interview with Gamasutra.

"38 Studios had a concept they couldn't deliver on... It was too big of a scope. It was too much. It it just went broader and never narrowed," he says. "They never even came close to the finish line."

Buttler went on to point to an issue of process management, which he believes never allowed the team to devise a plan to develop the game in a reasonable time.

In the case of SWTOR, Buttler doesn’t believe that the business model was an issue, but rather the content updates and what there is to do in the game to avoid repetitiveness. Buttler cited RIFT’s ambitious content updates that came pretty frequently after launch as a way to keep players interested.

"You have to be able to keep people interested. The key about an online game is that it's a live service. If you make it more like a packaged goods game, people will stay about as long as they stay with a packaged goods game."

Be sure to keep a check on our E3 2012 portal for all the latest news from the event.

Source: Gamasutra


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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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Stacy "Martuk" Jones was a long-time news editor and community manager for many of our previous game sites, such as Age of Conan. Stacy has since moved on to become a masked super hero, battling demons in another dimension.

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