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Star Wars: The Old Republic: 500k to Turn a Profit
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
According to a new report based on a conference call with EA's CFO Scott Brown, Star Wars: The Old Republic will turn a modest profit with a mere half-million subscribers. Brown offered this assessment despite recent statements that SWTOR has incurred 'significant' development costs. Brown went on to say that anything higher than a million subscribers would bring in significant revenue.
Brown stressed to investors that the costs being incurred now would "essentially turn on a dime" to profits the day the title ships, a date still targeted for sometime after March but before the end of calendar 2012.
Brown also criticized some news outlets for irresponsible reporting on the game's development costs.
Source: Gamasutra.
Comments
They should hit a million box sales easy.
However, Biowares complete disregard to gamer feedback and their arrogance towards us lowly subscribers seems to mean they are going to put out an MMO that fits 'their' vision, not one that MMO players want and will pay for. There are going to be a lot of MMO players that will eventually wonder why they are paying money each month to play the single player game that Bioware is creating. When that happens, no more money.
Unless all the news that we've heard and seen is somehow off base, this game's collapse is going to be a block buster.
As a former dark lord of the Sith would say "All to easy!". They should set themselves bigger goals in life. For instance, I have just set myself a new goal about what to have for lunch. I can't decide if I should have cheese or cheese. Life can be hard sometimes but if we don't strive for success then we will never acheive anything.;)
Can I point to this article whenever somebody talks about how SW:ToR will be the best game ever due to the incredibly massive hundreds of millions of dollars sunk into development?
Apparently the game isn't as expensive as people thought.
Either that or they're going for 80 dollar a month sub fees.
I agree. They should hit the 1 million boxes sales easy. 500k subscribers to be profitable is fair and they should get it too but it's not mentionned for how long they need them to be subscribe. 1 month? 6? 1 year?
If any developer totally develops one's game solely on gamer's feedback is going to loose.
Every gamers vision of what they want differs from each other.
All it says is: the development costs equal some 20 or 25 mio dollars, depending on the box sale value of 40 or 50 $ each. 20-30 mio $ is a good value for a MMO, so this might very well be true. It is also the amount of money many other dev teams had to work with. Many of which failed to use it to some success (Vanguard had 30 etc.)
So we have to expect nothing special from this one and if beta rumors about a pimped up single player game are correct, the need this early revenue, because they won't get much from subscritpions in the long run
Most of the "listening" to people is going on in the game testing area, very little is being asked of the public because, well quite frankly the public knows very little and what has come out is generally well received (except maybe space combat, that usually gets a meh/hate it response). The John Q public is usually the last to get asked if something should be changed unless theres a massive uprising on it.
Take the Jedi Wizard. After so much roaring about it, (probably in game as well) they asked the public is, okay you don't like jedi wizard, what should we change it to? They gave a poll and the winner of that poll is now the new class name. Thats getting feedback from the public.
As for the game testing crew themselves. Most are there to fix bugs (based on what i normally do at work) not give their opinion on what is good or not. Developers have a vision of what the game will look like, barring bugs they will try and stick to this vision as closely as possible. Unless the public starts to really dislike something in it then a good developer will modify it a bit so the public likes it, while trying to stay true to the original design.
Rarely will a developer listen and modify everything everyone asks for (like the above poster from me stated that usually doesn't end well) or even a lot of it, most times its a few tweaks here and there.
As for the single player arguement, that has already been invalidity several times. Not sure where your getting your info from but you might want to do more research as calling swtor single player is kinda like calling everquest or it's ilk single player. Sorry but nothing points to a single player game if you look into it. Nice try though
Help me Bioware, you're my only hope.
Is ToR going to be good? Dude it's Bioware making a freaking star wars game, all signs point to awesome. -G4tv MMo report.
I wouldnt take ANY notice of what this guy says.
500k subscribers, but for how long?. 500k subscribers, average over their licence term (typically 4 years) may indeed produce a profit.
But 500k subscribers over 3 months that drops to 50k for the rest of its term? maybe not.
I'm more inclinded to beleive mmorpg.com's previous maths which forcast they would need 2million subscribers for 2 years to break even!
unless of course its like STO where you subscribe AND have to buy things in the cash shop..
I think I'll -play Rift for the next 8-12 months until TOR is released. Yep, that would be the right thing to do.
With the way the game is going now, I'd be surprised if they even got to 500,000 subscribers.
I always think its funny when people think that the players actually matter in any way other than to give game companies money. The game development is always at least half way through when they announce the games release, and by that time, its too late to change anything. ALL MMO companies do that, NOT just Bioware.
The only thing I haven't enjoyed about what I've seen is the space combat. I think it will be a good game and I wish the naysayers would knock it off.
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
This news is hard to interpret because subscriber base is such a fluid number. I'm sure they'll sell a ton of boxes, but who knows where the subs will be after 2 months, 6 months, 1 year.
500k is a large number considering the relative few games that pull that many. Attention doesn't equal subs. One of the most frequently discussed game is EVE and it only pulls 300k.
This game is going to be huge, I have a feeling box sales will be 2 to 5 million alone world wide, that might be cutting it short, 500k to make a profit should not be hard to obtain, Bioware has stated they have 3 to 4 million fans alone, Star Wars has untold millions of fans, then you have mmo fans then you have rpg fans, then you have the newbs just getting into mmo's, there is a huge player base waiting to get into this game, and if EA markets the game properly, to bring in the folks on the fence, the true story will be how many can they retain, with an IP as huge as Star wars 500k does not seem like much, but until the game comes out and we get to play it, this is all just speculation, Time will tell..:)
I'll definatly try this game sometime . In the meantime I intend to play RIFT or GW2 . With all these interesting new mmos this year I cant see myself going back to WoW for a long time to come if ever . So long Azeroth .
My feedback may be different to yours so who should they listen too... me of course as the whole world knows I'm always right.
Even were it not for the fact that due to the nature of the net (blogs usually) we all are subjected to a plethora of willfully ignorant but yet highly opinionated 'news reporters', there still is the sad reality that over the years ALL 'news' media has been lowering the bar from their super-biased cherry picking of what news (and what elements of that news) they choose to report, the wording they use, and the mass of equally willfully ignorant readers who choose not to distinguish between fact and opinion. The result is at best confusion, but usually a mindless adoption of group think on the part of readers as a whole and the whole 'gaming news' market.
If sites are reporting high costs then they first need to define a baseline of what 'normal' costs are and then provide salient proof (and name sources) of their information.
Then there is that little annoying truth that sometimes you just gotta pay the price for quality. Perhaps if there are a significant number of big investors that don't understand this then they should probably not invest in markets like this. (also, they should do their homework, bioware is known for spending a lot but making much more due to the quality of their work)
Another bit of age old wisdom a lot of folks refuse to accept is that popularity does not equal wisdom or knowledge even. How many rock stars and movie stars must we be subjected to 'teaching' us about foreign policy and economics before we understand this? So some 'reporter' is a game fanatic and well networked... that does not mean he has a clue and can draw logical fact based conclusions. More importantly, said joke... er 'reporter' is most likely neither educated or experienced in the area of business and specifically the nature of businesses in the gaming industry.
As Joe Friday always said, "Just the facts ma'am". Perhaps we as consumers should start being smarter and be discerning on which sources of information are reliable and credible.
And this is also the reason they changed from 2 healing class specs per faction to 3 healers per faction. Because of tester's feedback.
This article got at least one fact incorrect: SW:TOR is targeted for sometime after March but before the end of calendar 2011, NOT 2012. The 2012 date is the Fiscal Year, which runs from April 1, 2011 - March 31, 2012. So TOR is still slated for launch this year.
As to only 500,000 subscribers being needed, one thing that needs to be remembered is that EA has stated that they expect TOR's lifespan to be 10 years. Thus, 500K subscribers over 10 years could easily still cover a huge development cost. Electronic Arts CFO Eric Brownhas stated that TOR is the, "largest ever development project, period, in the history of the company."
While I would not expect TOR's development cost to reach EALouise's $300 million, [url=http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/4115/Scott-Jennings-Great-Expectations-SWTOR.html]MMORPG's guesstimate[/url] of $150 Million is probably fairly close to the mark, IMO.
I dont get it, half a million subscribers for how long? Obviously half a million for 6 months is more money than for 5 months... so...?
Or do they mean half a million boxes sold?
My gaming blog
Probably 500K box sales at launch, since like most Western Sub-based mmo you will probably have to enter credit card info into the account system to play.
576 000 000 with 12€/$ monthly fee in 2 years if there was 2 million subbers. The number has no expenses but there is also no box sales in it. The game will be popular but I dont know if it will be that popular, I'd say maybe 1 mil. stabile if it will be a quality piece, which is still a big number even with the expenses. However, I cant even predict how much the Star Wars community alone, and Bioware fans + singleplayer newcomers will affect the result along with a positive standing in mmorpg community overall + positive take from most review sites I've seen, even before any bigger beta events. Not to mention the scifi-gap in mmorpg world if we dont talk about space-flying-only titles.
I know expenses are supposed to be huge, but even semi-succesfull mmorpgs gives a nice income flow, and taking into consideration everything around The Old Republic, Star Wars, and Bioware, I'm sure TOR will be doing just fine unless they screw up something royally.
So far I am pleased, since biggest thing I have begun to look in mmorpgs are more immersive world instead of walking from wall of text to another to do something because the wall of text compels so. Also most mmo companies with any bigger and hyped title are fantasy, a quality scifi title will have a lot of takers, afterall there's a huge bunch of scifi fans out there who are still waiting for a great mmorpg that isnt only space flying.
Or they are blantantly lying. Considering we're talking about EA here, that's the most likely option. Sounds like the marketing department is awkwardly attempting to do some damage control.
Hype train -> Reality
Also, what's this talk about Bioware having so many more fans than Anet?
Bioware sells ~2 millions of their games on PC, if they're lucky (and a bit more on console). KOTOR sales were lower than Mass Effect.
GW sold ~2 million of each edition. Sounds like the playing field is pretty even...
Hype train -> Reality
The underlined part makes me laugh. We ahven;t seen swuat when it comes to this game and all teh sudden they aren't listening to player feedback.
Plus, its kind of hard to listen to players and subscribers when there isn't any right now.