Bigpoint CEO claims SWTOR won’t be profitable

Bigpoint is one of the Biggest Publishers for F2P and Browser Games and CEO Heiko Hubertz recently stated that he believes that Star Wars – The Old Republic will never be profitable with it’s current financial concept.

“If you look in the traditional industry there are still a lot of big bets there,” said Hubertz, keynoting the London Games Conference this evening. “Still there are companies investing $20-40 million for a game. These companies have to be profitable after one or two months. They don’t have 12 months or even more. I think these companies are really in trouble in the future if a user can play online games for free.

“If you look at a game like Star Wars from EA and BioWare, they estimated a development budget of more than $100 million. This is an online game for many million of subscribers, so a big publisher does not understand that a subscription model is not the future.

“With micro-transactions and longer lifetime maybe I see a chance for this game but I don’t think that EA or BioWare will be profitable with this game. Ever.”

This is quiete a counterargument to Jack Emmer who said that SWTOR might be the only game that could generate enough revenue to exist in the world of subscription based games.