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EA "relaxed" that so many pre-ordered there game...
Xciser
Member UncommonPosts: 102
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/ea-relaxed-about-star-wars-old-republic-prospects/082481
In that article taken from an interview you can more or less see that EA is easily worried there game isnt going to profit. Its EA, I can see this turning into a huge money franchise with multiple expansions and other things... to suck dry the star wars fans wallets.
Discuss...
Comments
So you take that whole artical as, "Holy Shit their worried"?
Only on MMORPG.com.
more like... if we dont hit ______ number of subs, there going to pushing more money hardcore
Ouch. Nice find though.
"anything north of 1m, as we approach 1.5m or 2m, starts to look like a great investment"
Considering that WoW barely has that much in the US & EU combined, and those are the only places SWTOR is launching initially, that is really really rough. They have to basically get every single WoW player to play SWTOR for it to be a great investment... Makes me start thinking the $150 million estimate is right.
Multiple expansions? Imagine that ...
*shivers*
My brand new bloggity blog.
It's important that this MMO fails for the genre, otherwise we will see many more years of SWTOR clones which means many more years of WoW clones with cutscenes and probably made more linear.
If SWTOR fails then we'll see a complete attitude change towards the genre and they'll have to do something new and innovative to kick start it again.
Funny enough I find myself hoping on SOE because their next two games are going to be sandboxes.... I never thought I would but there really is nothing to look forward to other than Planetside, EQ3 and whatever Bethesda does.
If TOR fail then it means you can't make an MMO with a 80 million dollar budget, arguable the most famus IP in the westren world, and with one of the greatest video game developers.
Yeah that will propel the genre forward.
As a bussness man I doubt making an MMO would seem very profitable if TOR fails, and thus would no want to fund the making of one.
WoW has about 4.5 million subs in the west.
Yeah, TOR must fail, it's not like it's the sole thing hundreds of people depend on to feed their families, oh wait...
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/322375/Star-Wars-The-Old-Republic-Breaks-EA-Record-For-PreOrders.html
Exact same news which that article is referring to, but more info. EA aren't so much 'relaxed' as very very happy right now.
Good cause all the most innovative games seem to have the lowest budgets while all the highest budget games try to play it safe, that's the exact problem we've had over the years of just playing it safe and doing a WoW clone.
they are not the same at all... in the article I posted... you can see the amount of subs they are looking for and the money there looking for... if they dont fulfill that need they will somehow, its from the presidents perspective and is definately more revealing.
The one you posted shows the amount of money and annual earnings/summaries of EA...
That's pretty sad and flawed reasoning. Developers have a much easier time getting their funding if they can convince investors that the industry is growing and healthy; Swtor's potential succes could have a big impact on that, also by drawing in many people who haven't played mmorpgs before and subsequently increasing the overall mmorpg market share.
And without WOW there wouldn't be WOW clones but there wouldn't be as much sandbox alternatives instead either.
The bigger the industry, the more chance for indy and bigger devs to also make competing products that distinguish themselves from the big players and tap into niches of the marktet.
Of course there will always be copycats of succesful formula's. In any market. But the fact that there hasn't been a sandbox mmorpg on the scale of WOW says as much about failing developers as of the mmorpg gamer demography. And I am curious if we would have been so interested in all those popular sandbox game's clones either.
Big mmorpgs failing isn't in our interests at all.
My brand new bloggity blog.
All those are quotes in your article are from the earnings call. That thread I linked is about the earnings call... they are the same *facepalm*.
Just in case you thought I was making that up :
JR: "A couple of added points. There are about as many definitions of what's included in the RPG MMO market Our internal market based on what we've included shows it in the double digit millions of subscribers in the Western markets. Twelve to fourteen depending on whats included or not and higher if you start including the lower-price-per-month competitors. What we've told folks is that this is a product that would make profitability at about a half-a-million subs. At about a million subs it's good business, it makes good money on an ongoing basis but it doesn't feel good about the historical investment. Anything north of a million, as we approach a million-and-a-half or 2, it starts to look like a great investment that justifies the price in a very positive way."
From the darthater link. Exactly the same info.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
I did wonder why they were going for the pre-order angle without confirming a universal international release date. Just so EA could do a 'stress test' to evaluate the feasibility of whether there is a strong sub base via telemetric measuring and other statistics to approximate a potential profit margin makes sense.
It always cracks me up how some people equate innovative with quality, and bash big budget games for the sake of bashing them.
So why are you so hopeful that it fails? Aren't you playing all those low budgets games you love so well?
the rpoblem is if this mmo fails the industry as a whole will suffer. With the sereies of glaring failures in the last 5 years investors have become very fickle about what they invest in. EA is going to run STO like the did the sims...instead of just introdoucing new features they incorporate them into bloated expansions you PAY for. Want player housing, ahh here comes your expansion based around housing for 50 bucks. Want space combat free form, ahh heres your expansion etc etc. Don't get me wrong sims 3 was a good version of the sims but after they ran out of ideas they just cloned expansion from previous iterations. SO imagin where this is headed. I'm starting to wonder if dawntide releasing in october is going to be my saftey net since after the walkthrough of eselle i am very on the fence again
so say we all
It wasn't pretty, but SWG managed to survive since June 26, 2003 to December 2011 even after that horrendous NGE was implemented in November 2005.
There is always more room for failure when it comes to mmo's these days, however with the Star Wars LOGO and plenty of diehard fans, I don't think SWToR is going to fail in the long run.
I guess we will know if it lasts longer than SWG did (7 to 8 years from now) and where it still stands in the mmo world.
I on the other hand wish SWToR goodluck, if they do fail however, I just hope I get my moneys worth out of the time I play it.
I was going to create a long "are you crazy" post here but the bottom line is that anyone who wants any MMO to fail, ESPECIALLY SWTOR, has absolutely 0 business sense and explaining it all would be a complete waste of time. I am not trying to be insulting but this is such a silly thing to want .
Just to be clear, you think "sandbox" equates to Innovative? Also, you think there is nothing at all innovative, not one unique thing, in TOR? Are those accurate questions.
You know, I think this is the only real worry with SWTOR. Not that it will be successful in terms of an MMORPG, but that it will be successful enough to justify its large investment.
I'm pretty certain that SWTOR will sell a lot of boxes, but it has stiff competition. Lots of newcomers are entering the ring soon, and SWTOR is also going to have some fierce competition from WoW. It's all going to come down to whether or not SWTOR can retain subscriptions with its story based model.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
A lot, and I do mean A LOT of sandbox fans speak of sandbox games as being innovative. Of course in order to call a sandbox game innovative just because it's sandbox you have to completely redefine the word innovative. The truth is people throw that word 'innovative' around because it sounds good, they rarely put much thought into what the word actually means.
Yes, it's important what is likely the biggest budget mmo to fail. That will really drive investors to throw money at future games, innovative or not. Sheesh, learn business dude.
It takes so much energy to be so paranoid about a game that hasn't even released yet.
You agenda is showing.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
I would consider myself a sandbox fan and a themepark fan. I wouldn't call a game innovative just because it is a sandbox. For example, I don't consider Darkfall to be innovative because it was basically modeled directly off of UO. The only real innovation it has that I can think of is the whole territorial PvP thing. Everything else is very much like UO.
However, games like Eve or UO are definitely innovative...you really can't argue with that.
As a whole, I think sandbox games are generally more innovative, but that's because of two things:
1. There haven't really been that many of them. There are tons of themepark games and many of them are little more than clones...
2. A successful sandbox formula has yet to emerge. Nearly all themepark games use the "WoW" formula. There really isn't an equivalent "WoW" game in the sandbox sub-genre, so developers are basically forced to innovate to a degree.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?