Originally posted by Xzen This thread was doing good for a while there. Now the rabid fanboys from both camps have invaded. Too bad.
What I find humorous is that most of the basics both sides agree on.
SW:TOR is a themepark with themepark mechanics. To some this may hurt it. To others this is a strong selling point (we'll see in a few months). In addition it has a good number of unique characteristics that may or may not work well in practical application (we'll see in a few months). It also has a strong IP which could bring in hundreds of thousands of players who never played MMOs before (we'll see in a few months). It doesn't appear to be grossly incomplete (think STO) or have large amounts of technical issues (think WAR). If there are hidden flaw, then we don't know about them yet (we'll see in a few months).
From there, the rest seems to be speculation. As to that... we'll see in a few months.
I think this is a reasonable response.
People who like SWTOR know what they are getting already (heavy VO/lore story/themepark) and that's the appeal of it.
People who don't like SWTOR know what's in it (heavy VO/lore story/themepark) and that's what ruins it for them. Both sides know what's in the game.
At this point, there are people trying to deter others from buying it simply because they know the game isn't what they like, so they hope it will fail so future developers will somehow read their minds and make exactly the perfect game that's stuck in there. That's not going to happen.
SWTOR will probably meet the three million mark projected but in no way will they retain all of that. But as I've seen posted elsewhere, all Bioware has to have is 500k to be successful as they say.
That works out to retaining only about 16.5% of people who buy the game. Someone would be off their rocker to suggest they can't do that, no matter how much they hate Star Wars, EA, voice acting or themeparks. It's simply stupidity to suggest otherwise.
Even the worst games around end up retaining 16% of players. Even FFXIV, one of the worst games in recent memory as far as launches will have 16% of fans pay when they start charging. You can see/read that from their fansites alone. They can do that on the dedicated fans alone. Vanguard, WAR, DCUO, AoC.. probably all have 16% easily still left.
This is why people with objections about the game equates to spitting in the wind. It won't stop anything. It MAY deter 5% from trying SWTOR, but that won't matter in the long run.
I went with Mediocre because I dont believe it will reach WOW numbers, but I can only hope. If all is in the game so far like they said then the game will have some great success.
Having played it , biggest fail in mmo history. Everyone will be dissapointed with thsi game but the utmost diehards.
It's ok Rift fanboy, we know your scared that the Rift population is about to die when this game comes out.
Hey hey now I am the only real Rift fanboi here! Let me put it like this. It looks like a mmorpg and he quest are interesting to watch sometimes with the non buggy ones which can be fixed, but these wild claims of 4mil subs on the first day is not happening.
There are things missing from this game that WoW fans and Rift fans would rage over hard. Addons, x-server lfg and war fronts, swimming
Having played it , biggest fail in mmo history. Everyone will be dissapointed with thsi game but the utmost diehards.
It's ok Rift fanboy, we know your scared that the Rift population is about to die when this game comes out.
Hey hey now I am the only real Rift fanboi here! Let me put it like this. It looks like a mmorpg and he quest are interesting to watch sometimes with the non buggy ones which can be fixed, but these wild claims of 4mil subs on the first day is not happening.
There are things missing from this game that WoW fans and Rift fans would rage over hard. Addons, x-server lfg and war fronts, swimming
Not really wild claims, many industry analysts predict it will get 3 million sales at least. I think it will easily get that. Now as far as keeping them, I am estimating a user base of a million, which according to EA is a substational profit.
That has been a nice added bonus. GW2 fans are nothing if not entertaining. Much more entertaing than their game will ever be. I predict a staying power of about 2 million subs so long as the game remains stable.
We will see :P, scrap SW:TOR its SW IP and you have slightly modified version of WoW or Rift - even less interesting than gw2 :P. Will SW IP alone be able to keep subs at 2 milions ? - I dont think so ... IP alone will not do that as WAR or STAR TREK showed.
Nice try but nah.
More than enough game mechanics and aspects to make it very different from WOW and Rift despite the obvious similarities you see at a first glance (and which most detractors focus on).
I agree that only the IP doesn't make or break a game but stuff like full voice overs, meaningful alignment and choice, interesting classes, 17 vast and open planets, interesting take on companions with crew skills, personal ships, open world pvp and exploring with rewards and Bioware being behind all that with a huge budget ...
You can't sneak stuff like that out of the equation.
And you forgot to mention that end-game, the thing that is most relevant to keeping subs is raiding - all you mention will certainly keep you entertained for half of the year. After that comes raid hamster wheel with SW IP slapped on it - not enough to keep 2 mil subs (as poster to whom i reacted suggests ) imo.
You can't tell at this time that raiding will be the only long-term gameplay content. If world-pvp and crafting end up being a blast you certainly won't find me in an instance so very often. Also there's always making alts for more unique story goodness.
But seeing how you avoided my other points I take it you accept that there is more to Swtor than just the IP?
Well if they did copy WoW as good as they tried :P (sorry couldnt resist ), there is certainly more to it than just IP but not enough for me, to put it more precisly not enough different things. But I will answer your points .
I ignored cutscenes and VO, it's something I wouldn't base my decision to play or not, its just filler.
I like big open world (size of the world was one of the things i realy didnt liked in Rift) and 17 planets sounds promissing, but problem with WoW template is that devs who follow it, expand open world only in payed expansions.
Open world PvP with 2 factions imo fails - always failed in all mmo games i played and unfortunetly Bioware still didnt learned it from taking over Mythic and WAR.
Companions might just turn SW:TOR into single player game, they certainly did it in guild wars. They are imo mistake for mmo.
Crafting . Is this something you would do as your primary activity and reason to pay the sub ? For all those years I've played mmos maybe I knew 1 person who would do it, certainly not your average subscriber, regardless how good they do it.
So when you look at the game without rose tinted glasses you still see raiding as primary long term end game activity. Is that enough ?
That has been a nice added bonus. GW2 fans are nothing if not entertaining. Much more entertaing than their game will ever be. I predict a staying power of about 2 million subs so long as the game remains stable.
We will see :P, scrap SW:TOR its SW IP and you have slightly modified version of WoW or Rift - even less interesting than gw2 :P. Will SW IP alone be able to keep subs at 2 milions ? - I dont think so ... IP alone will not do that as WAR or STAR TREK showed.
Nice try but nah.
More than enough game mechanics and aspects to make it very different from WOW and Rift despite the obvious similarities you see at a first glance (and which most detractors focus on).
I agree that only the IP doesn't make or break a game but stuff like full voice overs, meaningful alignment and choice, interesting classes, 17 vast and open planets, interesting take on companions with crew skills, personal ships, open world pvp and exploring with rewards and Bioware being behind all that with a huge budget ...
You can't sneak stuff like that out of the equation.
And you forgot to mention that end-game, the thing that is most relevant to keeping subs is raiding - all you mention will certainly keep you entertained for half of the year. After that comes raid hamster wheel with SW IP slapped on it - not enough to keep 2 mil subs (as poster to whom i reacted suggests ) imo.
Considering that the majority of WoW subscribers do not participate in raiding, I find your argurment to be pointless. In any game that has raiding as an end game focus, you'll find casuals playing all of the rest of the content and happy to do so for long periods of time. This game isn't targeted at hardcores. It may offer raid content, but it's not the focus and it shouldn't be. If they want to retain the real money, then they need to keep up their current formula and support it after release.
In regards to WoW's penchant for raid content, you also have to keep in mind Blizzards well known design philosophy which has been stated in many interviews. Part of that philosophy is to create easier, casual friendly content for the earlier parts of the game, to draw in those casual gamers, then to slowly increased hardcore content to expose and hopefully convert those casual gamers into raiders. That philosophy ended up biting them on the ass and they had to backpedal early after reelease as the backlash hit when they kept adding raid after raid with no support for casual content. They had to reduce raid sizes and had to add tons more small group and solo content at the higher end of the game in order to placate those casual gamers. Hence the constant whine from hardcores about the dumbing down of the game and emergence of terms like Vanilla WoW and welfare epics.
As in: it can still be a succesful, highly profitable game, even when there isn't much evidence in a year from now that it will ever be able to directly compete with WOW in sub numbers.
I voted mediocre, I was just torn between the rising subs to rival WoW and sub-stagnation. I think in a year it will still be rising subs but not enough to really qualify as a WoW rival.
Originally posted by Puremallace It looks like a mmorpg and he quest are interesting to watch sometimes with the non buggy ones which can be fixed, but these wild claims of 4mil subs on the first day is not happening.
There are things missing from this game that WoW fans and Rift fans would rage over hard. Addons, x-server lfg and war fronts, swimming
Making a wild claim yourself and then "disproving it" is no way to discuss something. Who claimed "4 million subs" on the first day? No one. Your hyperbole doesn't help your post.
Estimates by professionals say 3 million total POSSIBLE, not definitely or all at one time.
If SWTOR only gets 16.5% of those to retain, they make their 500k goal. If they sell only 2 million, then they still only need 25% retention.
Someone would have to be pretty obtuse to suggest they can't retain 1 out of 4 people who buy the game given the size of the Star Wars fanbase alone.
Besides, those things you said that "WoW fans will miss" are were missing or are missing from RIFT (LFG, swimming, addons) already but yet RIFT claimed it stole 600k subs from WoW so...yeah seems when it suits you it's bad but yet when it's not in RIFT, it's different.
This game will not lose subs after a month/3/6/9/12 months, but instead steadily and constantly gain more.
Except it won't. Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World are releasing a few months after TOR. They're going to do a ton of damage to TOR's subscriber base. And that's even if TOR doesn't turn out to be as boring and lame as it appears.
I keep seeing Bioware being used as some kind of stamp of quality. While it's true that Bioware makes good games. The good games all come from Bioware studios up in Canada. This game is Bioware Austin. Hmmm EA had/has a studio in Austin. I wonder if they just decided to use the Bioware name that they own for marketing purposes?
Now I think SWTOR is going to be a good game don't get me wrong on that. But the Bioware branding doesn't really mean anything anymore. On the same note neither does the Blizzard branding.
Quote me on this Pony -most successful launch in MMO history and GROWTH from launch to both 6 and 12 months out.
This game will not lose subs after a month/3/6/9/12 months, but instead steadily and constantly gain more.
Since almost everyone will be in from week one ... Explain me why the proven subscripton drops in MMO's would not apply to this standard single server based game ? 6 years is more than enough to prove the data mentioned above.
Because almost everyone from WoW was in from week one....
Wait, no they weren't.
Because there is nothing "standard" about TOR.
Because you are comparing STAR WARS and BIOWARE to the likes of what? Funcom? Trion? CCP? Don't make me LAWL son. The fan base of the Conan IP or even the Warhammer IP, if you combined them, would maybe be what? A 10th of the Star Wars fan base?
The fan base of Funcom or Trion or Mythic or Cryptic games COMBINED is probably, what, 10% of the combined fan base for Bioware games?
That's like comparing the United States to Grenada.
This isn't just another random small company throwing their hat into the MMO ring, this isn't another Turbine or Cryptic or Funcom...
Bioware is huge... their games are huge, their reach and fan base is huge... and with the financial and marketing/publishing backing of EA, one of the biggest names in the entire freaking business.... not to mention oh I don't now the STAR WARS IP...
Seriously?
How can people even compare this to the Funcoms and Cryptics of the world.
ArenaNet? Sure, Guild Wars 1 sold a lot of copies and Guild Wars 2 looks awesome, but how many people outside of the MMO genre have ever even heard of them? Few. Hell, a great many people IN the MMO genre haven't played or heard of them.
Secret World? Once again we come back to FUNCOM... LOLCOM oh wait that's right they made Anarchy Online which no one has heard of outside of this website and Age of Conan which was so bad it went F2P.
You people have no perspective or clue beyond what exists between your face and the tip of your own nose...
It's as if you folks actually believe the opinions on THIS website or Massively etc. actually account for any more then what, 1% of 1% of the gaming world?
This game will not lose subs after a month/3/6/9/12 months, but instead steadily and constantly gain more.
Except it won't. Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World are releasing a few months after TOR. They're going to do a ton of damage to TOR's subscriber base. And that's even if TOR doesn't turn out to be as boring and lame as it appears.
The Secret World? One word: Funcom. They'll be out of the running a month after launch. As for GW2, due to its payment model, it won't eat into SWTOR's subscriptons too deeply, and by the time players get to endgame, they'll be rushing back to SWTOR. GW2 will be a nice diversion for people that want something different, but won't be able to hold players unless they churn out a lot of content after launch. That game is going to have a lot of missing pieces to it that people won't wait around for.
This game will not lose subs after a month/3/6/9/12 months, but instead steadily and constantly gain more.
Except it won't. Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World are releasing a few months after TOR. They're going to do a ton of damage to TOR's subscriber base. And that's even if TOR doesn't turn out to be as boring and lame as it appears.
I really don't think GW2 and SWTOR share much of the same audience. TSO won't take much either because we all remember AoC and many of us are painfully aware at how something can look amazing from FUNCOM and then turn out to be a complete lie.
We will see :P, scrap SW:TOR its SW IP and you have slightly modified version of WoW or Rift - even less interesting than gw2 :P. Will SW IP alone be able to keep subs at 2 milions ? - I dont think so ... IP alone will not do that as WAR or STAR TREK showed.
WAR and STO both were technically low quality, not to mention STO is the gold winner game when it comes to repeating the same content to no end. I personally quit WAR just because I grew tired of the animation bugs, slalom mobs, UI bugs, UI lag, UI registering my actions but the host not, non-existant gfx (spells look like sprite effects) and so on. Had it been polished and high quality it would have been a fun (and playable) game, most of the problems are not fixed even today.
There is so much more behind most of the mmorpg failures than simply "It was a wow clone and failed lololol" - most of the games that are being called wow clones by the burger crowd are technical failures or seriously lacking in obvious areas.
How many people would you say know about TOR? Five million? Twenty? Come on son, argue with me.
Somewhere between those two numbers would probably be accurate.
You'd have to find (somehow) the actual data to correlate pre-order numbers with a % of how many people who "plan to purchase" pre-order or not etc.
If only 50% of people who plan to purchase TOR have pre-ordered, then you can easily say they have what, 5 million at launch?
People who KNOW about TOR that don't plan on purchasing? Few million more?
But wait!
Mass Effect 2? 2 milliion people in first week (supposedly) purchased - I bet they know about TOR just cause Bioware's marketing blitz.
Dragon Age 2? "Over 1 million" in first 2 weeks.
etc. etc.
Mass Effect 2, despite what people on THESE forums say about it, is the most critically acclaimed game EA has ever published in like.. 27 years?
Between 5-20 million people who KNOW about TOR is probably fairly accurate...
Age of Conan "broke pre-order records" and shipped 700,000 copies for their launch.
700,000... or maybe 1/3 of what TOR has on pre-order.
Anyone who thinks TOR isn't going to be HUGE is delusional. FACT
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed sold 5.7 million copies world wide...
Well the numbers we have over, 1.5 million users registered for the beta.... that means that we'd likely have more than that of just registered forum users. Those people alone are a huge community, and these numbers were pre-preorder where the codes people got requested then to also register, so I would bet the numbers have nearly doubled.
For example, I know at least 3 people who have not registered for a forum account until after they preordered. Its a very small scale there, but extrapolate that, not just to preorders done by people like us, but I also bought preorders for 2 of my friends, and, furthermore think of others on the forums who would likely buy 1 copy for themselves and others for their children who don't have a forum account, but would create one for the early access code?
I think we're easily in the 3 - 5 million range on people who know about SWTOR.
How many people would you say know about TOR? Five million? Twenty? Come on son, argue with me.
Somewhere between those two numbers would probably be accurate.
You'd have to find (somehow) the actual data to correlate pre-order numbers with a % of how many people who "plan to purchase" pre-order or not etc.
If only 50% of people who plan to purchase TOR have pre-ordered, then you can easily say they have what, 5 million at launch?
People who KNOW about TOR that don't plan on purchasing? Few million more?
But wait!
Mass Effect 2? 2 milliion people in first week (supposedly) purchased - I bet they know about TOR just cause Bioware's marketing blitz.
Dragon Age 2? "Over 1 million" in first 2 weeks.
etc. etc.
Mass Effect 2, despite what people on THESE forums say about it, is the most critically acclaimed game EA has ever published in like.. 27 years?
Between 5-20 million people who KNOW about TOR is probably fairly accurate...
Age of Conan "broke pre-order records" and shipped 700,000 copies for their launch.
700,000... or maybe 1/3 of what TOR has on pre-order.
Anyone who thinks TOR isn't going to be HUGE is delusional. FACT
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed sold 5.7 million copies world wide...
Warhammer Online "broke pre-order records" and shipped 1,500,000 copies for their launch. And that was EA.
So if Warhammer Fantasy Battles is 1% of the popularity Star Wars is, then shouldn't Star Wars have something like 150,000,000 pre-orders, using your logic? Logic be damned indeed.
Both of those RPGs have overlap, and it's likely 90% of the Dragon Age players were also Mass Effect players, so you have a bit over 2,000,000 players that are in it for the RP elements, but won't necessarily stay for the MMO elements. Add the MMO players, and you'll get maybe another million. That's 3,000,000 players, and if we assume a 25% retention rate, that's 750,000 players, or right close to my 800,000 estimate.
TOR has little to no features that separate it from other MMO games in the end-game, so while their subscription numbers will look awesome for a while, they'll have a mass exodus the moment people finish with the "story" and single player elements.
1. Based on the VG charts and compared to COD XBox pre orders: SW will sell between 2.2 and 2.5 million worldwide copies in the first months (last COD XBox sold 6M copies).
2. Based on a 6 year old history of new subscription based MMORPG's: the game will have 60% retention rate after 2 months, 40% retention rate after 4 months and a further drop to 25% after 6+ months.
Reason: SW TOR is the normal quest - level - gear based MMORPG with the exact same mechanics. I can't see why it would be an exception to the rules in the MMO industry since 6 years.
SW is a new subscription game and this kind of system (even WOW and EVE) is under heavy attack from newer F2P models like web based games, Face book games, I Pad games and attractive AAA titles going free to play. People tend to leave subscription based games these days once they saw the final levels.
SW has no cross server game play. A necessity for popular games these days as casual players only want to stay in games where they can play any time without waiting both in solo content as group play. The present day number of concurrent players per server (3-4K) excludes spread out content being manned enough both in PvP and PVE after the usual decline in population and player activity (past 3 months).
This MMO is a Science Fiction based land shooter. A genre that never succeeded in the MMORPG field. These kind of games are compared with Science Fiction FPS games like Gears of War. Both in graphics, responsiveness, combat mechanics and immediate gratification for the younger player, MMO's are sub par to FPS which work without GCD and grind mechanics.
Take out the thin layer of "Star Wars", actually it is more like a young Clone Wars, both in look and design, and you get a 7 year old game mechanic with a standard single server play doing kill and collect quests to better the avatar in gear stats.
If you would add that voice over is not the main reason why people play mmorpg's, then I don't see why a normal 25% retention rate of subscriptions after 6+ months would not apply to SW TOR.
It's a Lotro, AOC, WAR, Aion, Rift single server play kind of launch, only with bigger numbers. 2.5 M in the launching period, 600 K subs by summer 2012. The others had 800K players going to 200K subs.
Since this decline was always spread per server, it simply means that the single server mechanic actually destroys the initial populations by going from 100% to 25% on average per server. In clear language: you don't go from 2 M to 500K players: you go from 3K players to 600 players per server concurrently, which renders most content useless for groups. The more land mass and content, the bigger the problems. The designers of a space opera spread over all those planets should have known better.
They choose for a very classical and "easy" solution of single realm play. Instead they needed an EVE like design of server clusters with each planet having a proper server or group of servers. But of course that was way out of line in design risks.
A further concern is that the game is in its final 10 weeks launching period and not even tested in Beta without dropping NDA, while the famous announced open Beta weekend was cancelled after one trial due to connection problems and the sheer time it takes to update that huge number of pre-recorded audio visual data.
Furthermore the official launch will take place a few days before Christmas. It is unbelievable to launch such a heavy data driven game 2 days before Christmas eve in EU. If anything goes wrong, expect an extreme outcry and QQ all over the internet. You only get one shot to launch.
All this because EA wanted it on their Quarterly financial reports before Dec 31. All the above is based on earlier facts and figures in this industry which can be traced both historically in previous MMO launches as in general evolutions in the gaming field.
I would like to add the following personal opinion though: EA is trying to conquer the Activision Blizzard market and they go for that market share both with Battlefield 3 (disastrous Beta 20 days before launch) as with SW (launching merely hours before Christmas and at the end of the... fiscal year, which is ridiculous from a gamers view but needed by the accountants).
EA doesn't make games themselves: they go for spreadsheets, hence they try to capture market share of COD and WOW - both market leaders - by copying them to the last inch within a strict time table that suit the cooperate balance sheets. The results could be disastrous as earlier attempts (like Warhammer On Line) showed. Every sign in these latest titles shows the chances are huge that the unsuccessful history will repeat itself.
The problem for the EA suits is ... these games they go for are already on their "later legs" (both in design and game play value) to begin with.
Excellent analysis, I concur 100%, especially with the bit about single realm vs server cluster structure which is, imo the way of the future. SW:TOR does look like a dinosaur already, a particularly large dinosaur with a very loud voice (forgive my pun) but a dinosaur nevertheless.
How many people would you say know about TOR? Five million? Twenty? Come on son, argue with me.
Somewhere between those two numbers would probably be accurate.
You'd have to find (somehow) the actual data to correlate pre-order numbers with a % of how many people who "plan to purchase" pre-order or not etc.
If only 50% of people who plan to purchase TOR have pre-ordered, then you can easily say they have what, 5 million at launch?
People who KNOW about TOR that don't plan on purchasing? Few million more?
But wait!
Mass Effect 2? 2 milliion people in first week (supposedly) purchased - I bet they know about TOR just cause Bioware's marketing blitz.
Dragon Age 2? "Over 1 million" in first 2 weeks.
etc. etc.
Mass Effect 2, despite what people on THESE forums say about it, is the most critically acclaimed game EA has ever published in like.. 27 years?
Between 5-20 million people who KNOW about TOR is probably fairly accurate...
Age of Conan "broke pre-order records" and shipped 700,000 copies for their launch.
700,000... or maybe 1/3 of what TOR has on pre-order.
Anyone who thinks TOR isn't going to be HUGE is delusional. FACT
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed sold 5.7 million copies world wide...
Warhammer Online "broke pre-order records" and shipped 1,500,000 copies for their launch. And that was EA.
So if Warhammer Fantasy Battles is 1% of the popularity Star Wars is, then shouldn't Star Wars have something like 150,000,000 pre-orders, using your logic? Logic be damned indeed.
Both of those RPGs have overlap, and it's likely 90% of the Dragon Age players were also Mass Effect players, so you have a bit over 2,000,000 players that are in it for the RP elements, but won't necessarily stay for the MMO elements. Add the MMO players, and you'll get maybe another million. That's 3,000,000 players, and if we assume a 25% retention rate, that's 750,000 players, or right close to my 800,000 estimate.
TOR has little to no features that separate it from other MMO games in the end-game, so while their subscription numbers will look awesome for a while, they'll have a mass exodus the moment people finish with the "story" and single player elements.
They actually have a lot more then just the regular end game. For one, end game starts pretty early with only major raids being held for end game. Other then that you have a lot of low to mid level flashpoints that are mini-raids that are repeatable. (all this has been mentioned, I'm not breaking any kind of NDA). You can also level through PvP as they've mentioned before, and, actually have a number of different ways to go.
On top of that, you have different classes AND different stories, as well as heroic missions which are based on the worlds you encounter.
On top of that, you're also assuming that those "other" MMOs that have the "same end game" will be better in some way then what SWTORs end-game will be. Just because SWTOR has raids and WoW or DCUO or EQ2 or whatever has raids, doesn't mean people will suddenly jump ship because they are done with the end game content.
You have to consider, not only will SWTOR have this stuff, what they may have might be... JUST MIGHT BE, better then whats been out before it, even if it is the same TYPE of content.
Then take into consideration the last possibilty, and maybe the most important.... the game is star wars. WoW isn't star wars. Star wars fans are nuts. Just being able to have a star wars game of BioWare polish that you can continuously play, grow, and change in will be more than enough to retain a good subset of players from that 3+ million pie.
Comments
It's ok Rift fanboy, we know your scared that the Rift population is about to die when this game comes out.
In Bioware we trust!
People who like SWTOR know what they are getting already (heavy VO/lore story/themepark) and that's the appeal of it.
People who don't like SWTOR know what's in it (heavy VO/lore story/themepark) and that's what ruins it for them. Both sides know what's in the game.
At this point, there are people trying to deter others from buying it simply because they know the game isn't what they like, so they hope it will fail so future developers will somehow read their minds and make exactly the perfect game that's stuck in there. That's not going to happen.
SWTOR will probably meet the three million mark projected but in no way will they retain all of that. But as I've seen posted elsewhere, all Bioware has to have is 500k to be successful as they say.
That works out to retaining only about 16.5% of people who buy the game. Someone would be off their rocker to suggest they can't do that, no matter how much they hate Star Wars, EA, voice acting or themeparks. It's simply stupidity to suggest otherwise.
Even the worst games around end up retaining 16% of players. Even FFXIV, one of the worst games in recent memory as far as launches will have 16% of fans pay when they start charging. You can see/read that from their fansites alone. They can do that on the dedicated fans alone. Vanguard, WAR, DCUO, AoC.. probably all have 16% easily still left.
This is why people with objections about the game equates to spitting in the wind. It won't stop anything. It MAY deter 5% from trying SWTOR, but that won't matter in the long run.
"TO MICHAEL!"
Plunger dance?
In Bioware we trust!
Hey hey now I am the only real Rift fanboi here! Let me put it like this. It looks like a mmorpg and he quest are interesting to watch sometimes with the non buggy ones which can be fixed, but these wild claims of 4mil subs on the first day is not happening.
There are things missing from this game that WoW fans and Rift fans would rage over hard. Addons, x-server lfg and war fronts, swimming
Not really wild claims, many industry analysts predict it will get 3 million sales at least. I think it will easily get that. Now as far as keeping them, I am estimating a user base of a million, which according to EA is a substational profit.
In Bioware we trust!
Well if they did copy WoW as good as they tried :P (sorry couldnt resist
), there is certainly more to it than just IP but not enough for me, to put it more precisly not enough different things. But I will answer your points .
I ignored cutscenes and VO, it's something I wouldn't base my decision to play or not, its just filler.
I like big open world (size of the world was one of the things i realy didnt liked in Rift) and 17 planets sounds promissing, but problem with WoW template is that devs who follow it, expand open world only in payed expansions.
Open world PvP with 2 factions imo fails - always failed in all mmo games i played and unfortunetly Bioware still didnt learned it from taking over Mythic and WAR.
Companions might just turn SW:TOR into single player game, they certainly did it in guild wars. They are imo mistake for mmo.
Crafting . Is this something you would do as your primary activity and reason to pay the sub ? For all those years I've played mmos maybe I knew 1 person who would do it, certainly not your average subscriber, regardless how good they do it.
So when you look at the game without rose tinted glasses you still see raiding as primary long term end game activity. Is that enough ?
Considering that the majority of WoW subscribers do not participate in raiding, I find your argurment to be pointless. In any game that has raiding as an end game focus, you'll find casuals playing all of the rest of the content and happy to do so for long periods of time. This game isn't targeted at hardcores. It may offer raid content, but it's not the focus and it shouldn't be. If they want to retain the real money, then they need to keep up their current formula and support it after release.
In regards to WoW's penchant for raid content, you also have to keep in mind Blizzards well known design philosophy which has been stated in many interviews. Part of that philosophy is to create easier, casual friendly content for the earlier parts of the game, to draw in those casual gamers, then to slowly increased hardcore content to expose and hopefully convert those casual gamers into raiders. That philosophy ended up biting them on the ass and they had to backpedal early after reelease as the backlash hit when they kept adding raid after raid with no support for casual content. They had to reduce raid sizes and had to add tons more small group and solo content at the higher end of the game in order to placate those casual gamers. Hence the constant whine from hardcores about the dumbing down of the game and emergence of terms like Vanilla WoW and welfare epics.
I think it could become a huge success, if they just keep the updates rolling in steadily and pay less attension to the whining nerf/buff-audience
Estimates by professionals say 3 million total POSSIBLE, not definitely or all at one time.
If SWTOR only gets 16.5% of those to retain, they make their 500k goal. If they sell only 2 million, then they still only need 25% retention.
Someone would have to be pretty obtuse to suggest they can't retain 1 out of 4 people who buy the game given the size of the Star Wars fanbase alone.
Besides, those things you said that "WoW fans will miss" are were missing or are missing from RIFT (LFG, swimming, addons) already but yet RIFT claimed it stole 600k subs from WoW so...yeah seems when it suits you it's bad but yet when it's not in RIFT, it's different.
"TO MICHAEL!"
So.. much.. stupid... must... resist...
Quote me on this Pony -most successful launch in MMO history and GROWTH from launch to both 6 and 12 months out.
This game will not lose subs after a month/3/6/9/12 months, but instead steadily and constantly gain more.
Except it won't. Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World are releasing a few months after TOR. They're going to do a ton of damage to TOR's subscriber base. And that's even if TOR doesn't turn out to be as boring and lame as it appears.
I keep seeing Bioware being used as some kind of stamp of quality. While it's true that Bioware makes good games. The good games all come from Bioware studios up in Canada. This game is Bioware Austin. Hmmm EA had/has a studio in Austin. I wonder if they just decided to use the Bioware name that they own for marketing purposes?
Now I think SWTOR is going to be a good game don't get me wrong on that. But the Bioware branding doesn't really mean anything anymore. On the same note neither does the Blizzard branding.
My theme song.
Because almost everyone from WoW was in from week one....
Wait, no they weren't.
Because there is nothing "standard" about TOR.
Because you are comparing STAR WARS and BIOWARE to the likes of what? Funcom? Trion? CCP? Don't make me LAWL son. The fan base of the Conan IP or even the Warhammer IP, if you combined them, would maybe be what? A 10th of the Star Wars fan base?
The fan base of Funcom or Trion or Mythic or Cryptic games COMBINED is probably, what, 10% of the combined fan base for Bioware games?
That's like comparing the United States to Grenada.
This isn't just another random small company throwing their hat into the MMO ring, this isn't another Turbine or Cryptic or Funcom...
Bioware is huge... their games are huge, their reach and fan base is huge... and with the financial and marketing/publishing backing of EA, one of the biggest names in the entire freaking business.... not to mention oh I don't now the STAR WARS IP...
Seriously?
How can people even compare this to the Funcoms and Cryptics of the world.
ArenaNet? Sure, Guild Wars 1 sold a lot of copies and Guild Wars 2 looks awesome, but how many people outside of the MMO genre have ever even heard of them? Few. Hell, a great many people IN the MMO genre haven't played or heard of them.
Secret World? Once again we come back to FUNCOM... LOLCOM oh wait that's right they made Anarchy Online which no one has heard of outside of this website and Age of Conan which was so bad it went F2P.
You people have no perspective or clue beyond what exists between your face and the tip of your own nose...
It's as if you folks actually believe the opinions on THIS website or Massively etc. actually account for any more then what, 1% of 1% of the gaming world?
The Secret World? One word: Funcom. They'll be out of the running a month after launch. As for GW2, due to its payment model, it won't eat into SWTOR's subscriptons too deeply, and by the time players get to endgame, they'll be rushing back to SWTOR. GW2 will be a nice diversion for people that want something different, but won't be able to hold players unless they churn out a lot of content after launch. That game is going to have a lot of missing pieces to it that people won't wait around for.
I really don't think GW2 and SWTOR share much of the same audience. TSO won't take much either because we all remember AoC and many of us are painfully aware at how something can look amazing from FUNCOM and then turn out to be a complete lie.
@ Darkpony: You need to add some numbers to the options, otherwise the poll is too vague.
F.e. assuming that SWTOR is active in US, EU, Australia, I'd say:
Huge success: 3m+ and rising
Mediocre success: ~ 2m and stagnating
Disappointing: ~ 1m and dropping
Disaster: less than 500k
Hype train -> Reality
WAR and STO both were technically low quality, not to mention STO is the gold winner game when it comes to repeating the same content to no end. I personally quit WAR just because I grew tired of the animation bugs, slalom mobs, UI bugs, UI lag, UI registering my actions but the host not, non-existant gfx (spells look like sprite effects) and so on. Had it been polished and high quality it would have been a fun (and playable) game, most of the problems are not fixed even today.
There is so much more behind most of the mmorpg failures than simply "It was a wow clone and failed lololol" - most of the games that are being called wow clones by the burger crowd are technical failures or seriously lacking in obvious areas.
Somewhere between those two numbers would probably be accurate.
You'd have to find (somehow) the actual data to correlate pre-order numbers with a % of how many people who "plan to purchase" pre-order or not etc.
If only 50% of people who plan to purchase TOR have pre-ordered, then you can easily say they have what, 5 million at launch?
People who KNOW about TOR that don't plan on purchasing? Few million more?
But wait!
Mass Effect 2? 2 milliion people in first week (supposedly) purchased - I bet they know about TOR just cause Bioware's marketing blitz.
Dragon Age 2? "Over 1 million" in first 2 weeks.
etc. etc.
Mass Effect 2, despite what people on THESE forums say about it, is the most critically acclaimed game EA has ever published in like.. 27 years?
Between 5-20 million people who KNOW about TOR is probably fairly accurate...
Age of Conan "broke pre-order records" and shipped 700,000 copies for their launch.
700,000... or maybe 1/3 of what TOR has on pre-order.
Anyone who thinks TOR isn't going to be HUGE is delusional. FACT
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed sold 5.7 million copies world wide...
Just got picked for beta weekend so I'll reserve my vote till monday
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
Well the numbers we have over, 1.5 million users registered for the beta.... that means that we'd likely have more than that of just registered forum users. Those people alone are a huge community, and these numbers were pre-preorder where the codes people got requested then to also register, so I would bet the numbers have nearly doubled.
For example, I know at least 3 people who have not registered for a forum account until after they preordered. Its a very small scale there, but extrapolate that, not just to preorders done by people like us, but I also bought preorders for 2 of my friends, and, furthermore think of others on the forums who would likely buy 1 copy for themselves and others for their children who don't have a forum account, but would create one for the early access code?
I think we're easily in the 3 - 5 million range on people who know about SWTOR.
If we are REALLY saying "know about" and not "have pre-ordered or plan to play" then KNOW ABOUT is probably easily in the 10-20 million people range.
It's hard to go anywhere on the internet for any game of any genre and not see SOMETHING about TOR somewhere.
Warhammer Online "broke pre-order records" and shipped 1,500,000 copies for their launch. And that was EA.
So if Warhammer Fantasy Battles is 1% of the popularity Star Wars is, then shouldn't Star Wars have something like 150,000,000 pre-orders, using your logic? Logic be damned indeed.
Both of those RPGs have overlap, and it's likely 90% of the Dragon Age players were also Mass Effect players, so you have a bit over 2,000,000 players that are in it for the RP elements, but won't necessarily stay for the MMO elements. Add the MMO players, and you'll get maybe another million. That's 3,000,000 players, and if we assume a 25% retention rate, that's 750,000 players, or right close to my 800,000 estimate.
TOR has little to no features that separate it from other MMO games in the end-game, so while their subscription numbers will look awesome for a while, they'll have a mass exodus the moment people finish with the "story" and single player elements.
Sarcasm is not a crime!
Excellent analysis, I concur 100%, especially with the bit about single realm vs server cluster structure which is, imo the way of the future. SW:TOR does look like a dinosaur already, a particularly large dinosaur with a very loud voice (forgive my pun) but a dinosaur nevertheless.
They actually have a lot more then just the regular end game. For one, end game starts pretty early with only major raids being held for end game. Other then that you have a lot of low to mid level flashpoints that are mini-raids that are repeatable. (all this has been mentioned, I'm not breaking any kind of NDA). You can also level through PvP as they've mentioned before, and, actually have a number of different ways to go.
On top of that, you have different classes AND different stories, as well as heroic missions which are based on the worlds you encounter.
On top of that, you're also assuming that those "other" MMOs that have the "same end game" will be better in some way then what SWTORs end-game will be. Just because SWTOR has raids and WoW or DCUO or EQ2 or whatever has raids, doesn't mean people will suddenly jump ship because they are done with the end game content.
You have to consider, not only will SWTOR have this stuff, what they may have might be... JUST MIGHT BE, better then whats been out before it, even if it is the same TYPE of content.
Then take into consideration the last possibilty, and maybe the most important.... the game is star wars. WoW isn't star wars. Star wars fans are nuts. Just being able to have a star wars game of BioWare polish that you can continuously play, grow, and change in will be more than enough to retain a good subset of players from that 3+ million pie.