Two weeks ago, IGN reported that SWTOR’s development would be transferred to a third-party studio, Broadsword Gaming. Many interpreted the news to mean that the game would be going into maintenance mode. Today, Keith Kanneg, SWTOR’s Game Director, offered some clarification on the upcoming transition, including stating directly that the game is not going into maintenance mode.
Keith’s Message
In a new post on the forums, Keith was as clear as can be that the game is “absolutely not” going into maintenance mode and gave us a glimpse into the timeline for new content and modernization.
7.3.1, which should contain Galactic Season 5, will be coming toward the end of summer while 7.4 is slated for release toward the beginning of the holiday season.
He also noted that SWTOR will be getting “improved integrations with Steam” and an upgrade to DirectX 12. Planning is also already underway for content and modernization initiatives coming in 2024 and 2025.
It’s worth noting that Keith didn’t refer to SWTOR’s new home by name in his most recent post and worded previous posts in a way that did not confirm that Broadsword would be the new studio.
It’s likely that Broadsword will be the new home and they just haven’t confirmed it for legal reasons, but it’s also possible that SWTOR could be taken over by a different studio.
Regardless, Keith is saying that SWTOR’s move to a new studio is mostly a back-end change and it sounds like content will continue to come at a consistent interval.
Nothing is happening to Cartel Coins and EA will remain the publisher and continue to manage your accounts and customer support.
I get the strong impression that this move to a 3rd-party studio was not widely known as it appears to have disrupted BioWare’s plans to move SWTOR to the cloud (Amazon Web Services, specifically).
This makes sense since it’s common practice for companies not to announce layoffs to their employees prior to them happening. It’s likely that most people at BioWare Austin didn’t know about the move to a 3rd-party studio until the leak was reported on by IGN.
Broader Context
The move to Broadsword (or some other 3rd party studio) isn’t happening in a vacuum. There’s a major restructuring happening at EA right now that adds more color to the whole situation which is corroborated by SWTOR’s former Design Director, Chris Schmidt, who offered an insider perspective on Twitter about what the move means.
The Restructuring at EA
The CEO of EA, Andrew Wilson, announced today that the company is being restructured into two organizations: EA SPORTS and EA Entertainment. Both organizations will still report directly to EA’s CEO, but EA is separating their sports games from the rest.
The change is pretty significant, but it makes sense given that sports games are pretty distinct from practically all other game genres at practically every level. The market and player demographics are fairly separate, the monetization is different, and the release cycle is significantly shorter and less involved.
Andrew (the CEO) also stated that two executives, Chris Bruzzo and Chris Suh, are departing EA. Since Chris is just retiring and there was a succession plan in place, it seems more likely that the restructuring is happening as a result of these departures, rather than these departures being a part of the restructuring.
This restructuring pertains to SWTOR changing hands because it creates an excellent opportunity for other changes to happen within the company. To use an analogy, if you’re remodeling the kitchen, might as well replace the leaky sink in the bathroom too since you’re already sink shopping and have a plumber coming out to do some work anyway.
It’s no secret that BioWare Edmonton has been in a nosedive for quite some time and it’s reasonable that Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is their last chance for redemption. EA could easily be giving SWTOR and BioWare Austin a parachute for what could realistically be another plane crash, and EA knows far more about how Dreadwolf is shaping up than we do.
An Insider Perspective from SWTOR’s Former Design Director
Shortly after the initial report from IGN, Chris Schmidt wrote a Twitter thread that helps to corroborate this perspective. Chris worked for BioWare Austin from 2009-2022 eventually rising to the role of Design Director for SWTOR. The length of his tenure and leadership role coupled with the fact that he didn’t have to say anything lends credibility to his statements.
In his Tweets, Chris characterized BioWare Austin as the red-headed step-child (or perhaps more accurately Cinderella) of EA and BioWare Edmonton by being “a very profitable business” and “[providing] mountains of income coming in that other franchises are built off” because “[SWTOR] doesn’t get marketing orgs excited or social media teams jazzed” and “was someone else’s game”.
To back up his argument, Chris also pointed out that SWTOR only got a demoralizing 10 pages out of the 328-page BioWare 25th-anniversary commemorative book despite being live, not just in development, for over a third of BioWare’s entire existence.
Meanwhile, he claimed that money generated by SWTOR was being diverted from the game in order to prop up gargantuan failures from BioWare like Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem.
Since SWTOR will no longer be under the BioWare umbrella, it can no longer act as a life preserver for BioWare Edmonton’s other projects and they will be left to sink or swim on their own. Since SWTOR was profitable, Chris expects the game could thrive now that the dev team has been “unleashed”.
What all of this means for SWTOR
When IGN first released their report, all signs pointed to SWTOR being a dead game and that the move to Broadsword would result in it going into maintenance mode.
I personally thought the sky on Dromund Kaas was falling. Now that we have more information, maintenance mode isn’t the most likely outcome anymore, not by a long shot.
Believing that SWTOR is going into maintenance mode now also means that you must believe that game’s director is outright lying to you, and that’s a massive step beyond the typical PR talk of beating around the bush and deceptively framing things in the best possible light.
In fact, it’s entirely possible that SWTOR could thrive in its new home, especially if those excess profits that were being used to prop up BioWare Edmonton’s failures are reinvested in SWTOR rather than being diverted, though that is rather optimistic and lacks concrete evidence.
Realistically, SWTOR isn’t going away, but a long future is by no means guaranteed. 7.0 continues to be a mess as content development resources are diverted to (in many cases) long-overdue modernizations while the news of the studio transfer has caused a panic that may have already contributed to declining player numbers.
Once they have all the major upgrades dealt with, like 64-bit, moving servers to the cloud, and the upgrade to DX12, it might be smarter for BioWare, or Broadsword, to slow down on the modernizations and focus on content so they can better retain players.
Regardless of what the future holds, there’s fresh content that just came out last week including a new solo story “Old Wounds” that takes place in a new area on Voss, a new Flashpoint called Shrine of Silence. Check out my 7.3 Changes Overview and Patch Notes for more detailed information.
We’ve recently released our SWTOR Guides Master List. It’s a great starting point if you are looking for a specific type of guide about the game.
