I saw the game at a local bestbuy affiliate for $15. Did it tank that bad, is it gone F2P, or what?

Yes, and it's fucking hilarious.

As soon as "how it benefits you and how enthusiastic our team is about this new direction" came up, you know that this shit was written by PR fuzz.

Pretty much.

"Dude we're gonna take on WoW AND we're going to get all those singleplayer peeps to pay up for an online-only subscription game! We're fucking geniuses!"

*game bombs*

"FUCK DUDE!"

I personally LOVE that SWTOR takes after the previous KOTOR games... and do not agree with the MMO part. Should have been an offline game with multiplayer because at the end of the day, that's what it looks like.

Still lining up the day it hits Free to Play. Me and my buddy will be playing it for sure.

If you expect it to play like a singleplayer game you will be disappointed. It plays basically the same as WoW, only with voice acting. You can solo it, but it's nowhere near as fun as a game designed to be played by yourself for a flat cost.

Uh huh. Keep an open mind, right? :)

I'm playing it now, and do not regret paying for the gametime so far.

Granted, I was invited to play a trial about half a year ago, bought the game a while later, but only installed the full game just less than a month ago when I took my desktop online again, so it might just be that I haven't grown tired of it yet (the laptop could just barely handle the game on the lowest settings and next lowest resolution (lowest wouldn't work at all), so I didn't want to use up paid gametime on that machine).

Yes, I'd likely enjoy it more if it were a single-player game (optionally with multiplayer), and I'm a bit disappointed about the space missions (I enjoyed flying around freely in Star Wars: Galaxies) and lack of player housing (although, those two are mostly because I was partially expecting a "better" SWG), but on the whole I'm quite content - and yes, I know that "player housing" and "single-player" pretty much contradict each other as the former is a mostly social feature unless it's only used for storage like in Elder Scrolls Morrowind and newer.

I think you forgot the part about spending a gazillion dollars on marketing. Well, I suppose they got their investment back (this is based on 0% fact and 100% spontaneous speculation), but it does not seem like the cash cow they were hoping for...

The whole MMORPG market is shifting towards F2P. EA came in right at the wrong time. Maybe it is a blessing in disguise, because from the looks of it it will be the most polished AAA MMORPG F2P out there.

From who the industry looks you can currently make more money of the F2P as long as your aren't called Blizzard. Even failed MMORPGs come back as F2P and at least manage to stick around this time.

Blizzard are certainly making money off F2P, in the form of taking a percentage off real-money Diablo 3 auctions.

It's going F2P in a couple of months. For now it's an awesome game, in my opinion. :)