Yet another game industry member is pouring cold water on the chances of success of the upcoming MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic and this time the person is not staying anonymous. IGN reports that Bigpoint's CEO Heiko Hubertz, during a speech at the London Games Conference, claimed that BioWare's MMO would need to have a million subscribers over an extended period of time to just break even. However Hubertz doesn't believe that can be achieved.

Bigpoint, who has been successful in publishing free-to-play browser games and is working on the upcoming Battlestar Galactica MMO title, believes that the monthly subscription model for MMO games is "fundamentally flawed" and that the micro-transaction business model is the only way to go for a successful game in the genre. It's important to point out that at the moment developer BioWare and publisher LucasArts have not yet announced a final business model for Star Wars The Old Republic.