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Star Wars: The Old Republic: Subscriptions Declining Says Analyst
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Extreme KOTOR fan; I'm shamefully depressed to see TOR in this condition. Better to let it die quickly. Maybe a KOTOR 3 will see the light of day.
Played - M59, EQOA, EQ, EQ2, PS, SWG[Favorite], DAoC, UO, RS, MXO, CoH/CoV, TR, FFXI, FoM, WoW, Eve, Rift, SWTOR, TSW.
Playing - PS2, AoW, GW2
Only shows that you both have not read the linked article from Gamasutra because it was MMORPG.com that made the wrong statement about Q1.
"Cowen's Doug Creutz estimates that subscriber numbers for the game peaked at 1.7 million in February, and that by the end of the current fiscal year in March 2013, the game will have around 1.25 million subscribers, based on server statistics provided on TorStatus.net."
Always a good idea to actually read an article before commenting on it.
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Unfortunately EA/Bioware will most likely not let SWTOR die a quick (somewhat painless) death, they will drag its slowly decaying corpse through the dirt for several years before they call it quits.
That's about 50% actually.
SWTOR has sold around 2.3 million.
MMOs played: WoW, Star Wars Galaxies, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Guild Wars, Planetside, Global Agenda, Star Trek Online, RIFT, Everquest 2, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, EvE online, APB
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On what basis do you place that hope? They've already said everything WoW did was their business model. The only difference in their eyes is storylines and voiceovers. Other than that, whatever WoW did, they said they will emulate.
So... what are the numbers going to look like? I thoght SWTOR was down to 1.7 million subs (including inactive accounts) and down to 600-700k active playerbase.
i hope bioware wakes up or we're gonna have to call real time worlds and tell them they were ousted by bioware.
Shoulda put roughly. In short, they are going from (allegedly) 1.7 (the baseline number he is working with according to "statistics at torstatus.net) to his projection of 1.25 million at the start of Q1 2013. as xen pointed out, that's October of 2012. That's a 26.4% decline. Slight roundup to 30.
I say that's the best case scenario for EA. Even losing 30% over the first year of the game isn't something to be proud of. That isn't going to inspire investor confidence that you've got a long-term strategy for the game to make profit.
As everyone else points out, the MMO market is about to get a lot more competitive late 2012 through 2013. A game that lost 30% of their subs without much competition is gonna get people to invest when there is a lot more competition?
Welcome to the deceptive numbers game companies play!
The 2.3 million is a combination between the digital distribution and the physical box products. Some of these go to venue not wholly owned by them, so the profit margins per unit are a bit tough to discern.
Now by this metric, 3.5 million copies of "E.T" on Atari were "sold." Just because a game reaches a store shelf doesn't mean it will sell. Even though the "sold" 3.5 million copies (again, according to the way EA phrases things) the game ended up being a huge debt machine for Atari, and helped almost kill the infant video game industry.
This is where the 1.7m figure comes in. that's the amount of people who bought the game and installed it. This again is not the actual subscriber count. These are people who simply played for the first month. They have not decided whether or not they will actually become real subscribers to this game. Sometimes these people also buy multi-month accounts, but don't stick around. These are combinations of what you call "active accounts" and after a month of play, sure enough, there were indeed 1.7m "active accounts."
Now how many of those 1.7m actually stick around, and how do replacements impact these numbers? Nobody has any clue. Some have said through ambigious statements about half of those people stayed, which actually made the numbers around 850k. Now lets go off this individuals baseline of 26.4 percent. That would make the actual sub numbers around 625k.
I would say a more realistic number would be between 700k and 1 million subcribers in October of this year. Yet over those next 4 to 6 months, I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers dropped below 500k due to increased competition, and that right now Bioware has yet to show doing anything really different to "shake things up."
Of course, all of these numbers, including of the analyst, are nonsense, since only the brass at EA knows the actual subscription numbers.
It just goes to show , you cant just continue to copy and paste from other games like WOW add a few light sabers and a few actors talking and expect people to think it is a great game .
I hope developers learn from the failure of SWTOR that we arent going to keep buying the same garbage anymore.
Given all the free time they are giving away it does worry me a bit that maybe the subs are experiencing sharper declines than EA/BW would like but I am having so much fun in the game I can't see it being in "trouble". Again with all the free time they are giving away though I'm curious to see how things pan out.
BestSigEver :P
Maybe they shouldn't have spent so much on the Voice Over-ing, and more on the content...like a better graphics engine (WoW 2.0 graphics atm).
And I love how they (and here) aren't even mentioning that [u]MOST[/u] of the people who had ME3 (and hated the ending) and SWTOR going dropped SWTOR in protest of the shitting ending Bioware gave ME3.
Say what you will about it but, you have to admit if you hated the ending and the response a company had towards one of their titles and swearing how you'd never buy from them again, you'd look like a fool to still have an active payment plan for another one of their titles.
-We put our money were our mouth was.
Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising everytime we fall.
Don't need an analyst to tell us this if you play the game... Sad really, game was a stunning let down.
no lie or exageration my server is still pretty packed, yeah I read tons of posts on here of people complaining the server they are on is empty but my server is always full of people.
not trying to start a debate just saying you can't or shouldn't assume what other people see when they play the game.
And i thought we are not supposed to believe analysts?
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/4923024#4923024
Such double standards.
the problem is the numbers do not remotely tally with the real numbers playing the game.
Rememnber they are also counting trial 7 day accounts...whether they subscribe or not.
Just take a look at any european server...they are all light and dead, in fact it's almost impossible to find anyone to even speak to on their euro servers such is the rapid decline in numbers.
In fact I would be as bold to say the first month free wear off has been the main cause of the number drops.
The other thing to point out is the realiability of paid sites to do the number crunching..it's always nice to see over inflated numbers, but the reality is the numbers they are projecting a laugh a second.
I would say from a gaming point of view across the european severs, the game is now for all intents and purposes dead here.
American's can play on the european servers and vice versa, however I have yet to see any real evidence european players would play on american servers due to the awful lag this game has in europe.
Further more, I do not believe throwing content at this game is going to help it in the slightest.
Although this game as a bunch of bugs, the number decline cannot be attributed to bugs and lack of content.
It has an annoying throw away story, the developers are on their own course they listen to nothing or anyone. They are too busy implementing pointless things into the game instead of adding meaningful stuff that should have been there from launch.
I spent close to €150 on the CE, which I might add for that price I was expecting a whole lot more than the silly black long sleeved book, a statue and a couple of ingame items which they expect you to buy.
I got more a lot more from my SWG CE.
This game has not suddenly just lost subscribers, in Europe it's been leaking them at a very high rate after the first month was done....in fact people where quitting within 2 weeks of the 30 day free from the box.
There are too many problems with this game. People won't come back, there are better alternatives out there, even F2P.
1.25 million subscribers, that translates to pretty much empty servers right across the US and far far more noticeable across the EU.
This game is going F2P whether anyone likes it not, the damage as been done, we paid for the game and there is absolutely no way is this game worth subscribing to, no matter how much content they put in.
It says it all when SWG players said "I told you so".
Have you actually tried?
I'm in the UK and I've been playing on a US server since launch; I have no lag.
I've played a few games with EU servers that were laggy as hell, where the US servers were fine (City of Heroes for example)
Yup tried a couple of us servers, they where really laggy much more so than the euro servers
Interesting, I started on a US server, then tried an EU server a couple of times and found no real difference so went back.
I'm on the other side of the Mersey though, so I'm closer to America than you.
I agree. My server is a ghost town also. Hard to find anyone to do the team storylines in my level group.
Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made [man] is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one... that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. ~Mark Twain
I agree with most posters, it's mostly a single player game, with coop elements (and that's how I play it). On the other hand, almost every MMO follow the same pattern.
Release, patch and update, then add content.
It is my belief that almost all of those who leave, would have left anyway. Or they would never have come as the game would have taken another 6 months to develop. People are somewhat unfair, as they tend to compare a fresh MMO to another out 5+ years.
Which makes me furious, if this is a coop style game; at least add a 'lobby' ala Dungeon Finder. =
Played - M59, EQOA, EQ, EQ2, PS, SWG[Favorite], DAoC, UO, RS, MXO, CoH/CoV, TR, FFXI, FoM, WoW, Eve, Rift, SWTOR, TSW.
Playing - PS2, AoW, GW2
1.2 million, making it still the second most successful subscription based mmo by a large margin.
I don't think they should cry about it, i quit in month 2 myself.
I think alot of people are super spoiled. WoW didn't have very much endgame content either when it was released. If you're in a huge guild doing constant flashpoints and operations then yeah you're going to blow thru all the endgame constantly. But my guild is relatively small, and we dont have the numbers or activity to get thru all the content as quickly. Soon I'll have 2 more 50s and we still haven't run all the way thru hardmode kp or ev. But were still having fun.
Nothing wrong with starwars it just isn't having content released quickly enough just like most mmos. Atleast you dont have to wait 1 - 2 years for a paid for expansion. Not to say these free updates are anything close to a wow expansion in magnitude. But with all the updates you get every couple months it will be something like that.