Megan Fox: Making Money Online With

Bank of America is making an 11th-hour push for inclusion in the upcoming Worst Company In America tournament. Starting in February, folks with BofA mortgages who don't have BofA bank accounts will see their current 15-day grace period for making payments cut by 40%.

From MSNBC's Red Tape blog:

Consumers who use the bank's online payment tool, Mortgage Pay, will risk a $6 fee if they fund payments using another bank's checking account and the payment falls during the final six days of the traditional 15-day grace period. Consumers who make payments from Bank of America accounts are not subject to the fee.

So... it's not really a grace period anymore for those people, is it?

Gail Hillebrand from Consumers Union (the proud parent of Consumerist) had this to say:

Let me get this straight. They tell you that you have a grace period, (then) they say, 'Oops, you only have half of it if you don't bank with us,'... That doesn't seem fair. ... This looks like a new 'gotcha,' and we have enough of those already.

Many of the people with BofA mortgages don't have an existing checking account with the bank because they didn't get their mortgage from BofA to begin with.

"You don't want to have to go around changing your checking account every time someone buys your mortgage," said Hillebrand, who says the way to avoid this problem is to make your payment before the grace period even kicks in. "This is just one more way to extract money out of you that you don't expect to have to pay."

B of A redefines 'grace period' with new fee [MSNBC]

With 12 million paying subscribers, World of WarCraft is the juggernaut of the massively multiplayer online game business. But Star Wars: The Old Republic is waiting in the wings to challenge WoW’s dominance of online gaming. After many years of development and rumors of an absurdly high budget, Star Wars The Old Republic is expected to launch later this year.

If the Star Wars game succeeds, it could generate huge revenues for Electronic Arts and prove that the MMO market is a real, competitive market, not one dominated by a single company that can defeat all rivals. It also means there may be more opportunity in the MMO market for other companies, such as Trion Worlds, which is launching its Rift: Planes of Telara MMO in March.

We talked to the founders of BioWare, the Electronic Arts division that is making The Old Republic, about the pressure they’re under to make this game a success. WoW has dominated MMOs for more than seven years and it just saw a huge revival with the launch of World of WarCraft: Cataclysm in December. With each expansion pack, WoW offers new innovations to its users, and Cataclysm sold 4.7 million units in its first month. That will help WoW retain its subscriber numbers and possibly even grow them.

But Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, co-founders of BioWare, say they can offer something new. They’ve got the license for the Star Wars content that everyone loves — something that Muzyka calls a “force multiplier” for the game’s marketing efforts. They are also integrating a lot of quest-oriented missions and a deep storyline into the game, much like BioWare does with its other epic games.

As for that crazy budget rumored to be above $100 million, there has been no corroboration of that. On the company’s last earnings call, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello said that the company is aware of rumors about the budget and they aren’t necessarily true. He said the company could make money on as little as 500,000 subscribers and that getting more than 1 million subscribers would be a highly profitable hit.

Even so, no one disputes that this is one of the most ambitious video games undertaken. BioWare is one of the few companies with the track record of success to pull it off.

Check out our interview with the BioWare founders below.

Next Story: Pandora looks beyond music to sports and talk shows Previous Story: Pandora expects to lose money until 2012

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Megan Fox

Thursday 17 February 2011

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