I am thinking it will settle in at 400-500k western type paying subs.... I voted that it would hit somewhere around 3-4 million, before it was launched, due to budget, BW, and figuring the game would be better than it was.... I highly doubt it can stay about 1 million paying subs, and with the budget, larger mmo market, that is a major disappointment imo.... Lucas cannot be happy, with what he must term another failure, since he wasn't happy with 350k or so with SWG, with a smaller mmo market.
Agree.
My predictions before launch were 3-5 million and I still feel they could've easily hit his mark if they just copy-pasted most of the WoW "quality of life" features, such as LFG system, Arena PVP, cross-server Warzones, good Auction house and less laggy combat and warzones.
Something to keep in mind. EA's Fiscal calendar is NOT in sync with the standard calendar. They report Q4 2012 end of the month/begining of May so the estimation is for current numbers.
Shuts the crowd up? Yes clearly ONLY falling 30% of net subscribers is a victory over the haters boy that will teach them.
Did you really have to split the original thread discussion into a new one ?
Anyway, as I wrote in the other :
Considering the 4 other mastodon MMOs being released this year (Pandaria, GW2, TERA, and to an extent, Secret World), and considering the general dissatisfaction gamers have felt towards the title, only estimating a 500.000 loss in one year is totally unrealistic. It's not like there was one sole concurrent, there are four ... and four big, big ones. 500.000 is :
- half what WoW lost in a year, but long time players will move back to Pandaria, at least to try it
- at least half the estimated number of GW2 players
- grossly the number of TERA expected players, and a little less for Secret World (considering old sub numbers like AoC, WAR, Rift, etc during periods where WoW was still a huge challenger).
I wonder where this analyst comes from. I sense pure damage control PR.
I think you're onto something there. One only has to look at the server status at prime time to see how it's doing. One step further, log in and servers are barren wastelands wherever you go, with the exception of the 2-4 heavy/full servers. If it weren't for the fanboism of the Star Wars/Biodrones customers, I would feel sorry for them a bit. They've been begging for server transfers/mergers for 2 months now.
The official communication is 1.7 milion somethings(active accounts, paid accounts, box sale...who knows) but what we do kn ow is that this information was given to us by corporate thugs speaking in legal fairytale buisness terms. Well the legal defination of "vast majority" can mean simply 51% + of any original number. So taking into the fact that EA has been super sketchy about there numbers its fairly easy to beleive that THEIR "Vast Majority" referss to exactly that 51+% so...
51% of 1,700,000= 867,000
867,000
this is the number that ppl should have been focusing on since its based on the only facts we have to work with.
that number sucks for a game with this much marketing...and im pretty sure its -450k that those anylysts are talking about so id put this healthy game at a whopping
450k subs!
450k subscribers with pretty much 0 chance to get things moving again thanks to the word of mouth HAMMER that has struck already.
Quite ironic that for the past six months when people posting here used torstatus to make estimates or show declining trends, they were told you can't use torstatus as a valid way to gauge numbers. Yet now an analyst using torstatus is held to be gospel truth.
___________________________ Have flask; will travel.
one thing is sure ,my initial time card i baught ran out of time and my 30 days free is also out,and this week they put a free 1.2 access till this week-end.so real number are about to popup if they havent already!
The analyst said that the number of subs had peaked in February.
Yet in February EA said that they had 1.7M the majority of which were subs.
Whilstt in March - at the conference - EA provided the additional info that najority in February meant 'half' whereas 'now' i.e. in March the 'vast majority' of the 1.7M were through there 30 day included. Whatever EA meant - lots of discussion of course - the message in March was that subs were higher than in February.
So February would not be the peak month; does this mean the analyst is wrong or EA?
Well whatever in your hearts you all know this is a 300k sub game at best, it's not even a good stable, 500 to 600k game. All that time and money wasted by EA just to create a reskinned NGE because they just knew the players were wrong the first time and they were gonna prove it gosh darnit.
I think these twits need to understand the Sci Fi audience is different, even campy sci fi like Star Wars. The best sci fi mmorpgs like EVE which after it's said and done will probably have more subs than TOR since its a steady 450k every year and they fight like dogs for every 50k worth of players. Content patches, bug fixes and customer support will easily blow anything EA has to offer out the window. it took Anarchy online 8 years to finally lose subs dispite their release problems, thats free and paying players, Ryzom has a small yet mortally dedicated fan base which keeps the heartbeat ticking they don't keep those players by being pricks.
I am not talking only in sub numbers but in philosophy, an updated version of something closer to what Ryzom did would be much more in tune with Star Wars lore than a WOW clone would. Star Wars isn't a raid grind, no one thinks of 50 foot raid bosses in Star Wars. Star Wars is not a RVR game it just deoesn't fit, and its not an Esport game, because it looks dumb on Star Wars. Star Wars is best approached as some kind of hybrid between terrestrial sandboxyness and Cyberpunk with just enough themepark thrown in the prevent full loot and corpse griefing. But World of Warcraft in space will get rejected every time.
Name one other MMO, other than WoW, which has ever had 1.2M subscribers.
You guys are all acting like 1.2M subscribers is complete crap, and meanwhile no other game in the history of MMO's has ever achieved even that. Geesh.
Lineage, Lineage II, Maple Story, Runescape, Aion (may still be over 1 mil), Warhammer Online (briefly), Rift (briefly), EQII (briefly)
There are probably more Asian ones I am missing, but seriously people way underestimate how easy it is to get to 1 mil subs these days, at least for a short period of time.
You guys forget the convenient truth that playing less =/= unsub.
Of course there will be less activity now than compared to launch, that is not indication that the subs are under a million.
A legit analysts words weigh more than 20 trolls on mmorpg "special analysis" no matter how hard you kids cry and try lol
Repeat after me:
"My name is Monorojo and I'm an addict of Bioware's kool-aid."
The "legit analyst" was giving those numbers proving what a failure TOR has been, not a "smashing retention rate." Consider that in the actual report, he gives whithering criticism of the lack of endgame. It isn't that it "lacks content." It's rather that the content is boring and pointless. Bioware could add "endgame" content, but that doesn't impact the numbers, according to your "legit analyst." In short, that that 1.2 million is the ceiling, not the floor.
Playing less isn't the equivalent of unsubbing. Far from it. Some people take breaks because of RL. But they continue being a part of the community and the game. There's a good chance they will come back. When a person unsubs, more often than not, they are gone. Those free weeks or weekends might get 40% of those people who left if they do it really successfully.
Anyone who isn't addicted to the kool-aid of his pet cause understands this distinction.
From the link it looks like an analyst from from an outside company. Furthermore it sounds like their predicting this not based off of hard info, but based off the reports EA has been giving out, which many of us know to be rather BS.
Just think of it this way, the 1.7m number they keep floating around is from fairly early in their launch cycle (back when a vast majority of servers were sitting at heavy - full). Now almost no servers are sitting at heavy, let alone full, with most being at light all the time. Now if we go by some of the sites that have tried to quanitify this data, there has been a HUGE drop in population since february. We're talking ~ 50% drop or so if not a little more. The population does seem to have stabilized now. But if their starting number is around 1.7m, then cut that in half, and you have a much more accurate figure to go with.
This still means they'd be sitting at a little less than a mil, though. ~ 800-900k. Which isn't a bad population. But it does mean they are going to have to start merging stuff very soon. Another thing that most of us already know.
It's illegal to falsify records for the purpose of making your public corporation look better. Electronic Arts being a publically traded corporation would go bankrupt with law suits if it was discovered they had lied about these numbers.
Actually it's wrong to falsify stuff used in investor information. I.e. you can't fudge numbers. Nobody is accusing EA of actually using false numbers (i.e. they are outright falsifying in official reports subscriber numbers.) What we are saying is that the PR team is spinning. Corporations do this all the time. For example, "active account" is not the same as "subscribed" or "playing the game." That is why the numbers are BS. They are true but irrelevant to the actual issue under discussion.
That once again is, what are the actual subscription numbers of people currently subscribed to the game? And then, what are the actual numbers of people playing the game over a certain period of time? If you'll notice, companies like Billzard have had no problem providing these numbers from time to time when they were launching. Why? they made the point: they had a massive hit on their hands.
I have no reason to doubt they are already close to that number now. Their recent shenanigans will guarantee that ALL of the three monthers will count for one more month.
Well whatever in your hearts you all know this is a 300k sub game at best, it's not even a good stable, 500 to 600k game. All that time and money wasted by EA just to create a reskinned NGE because they just knew the players were wrong the first time and they were gonna prove it gosh darnit.
I think these twits need to understand the Sci Fi audience is different, even campy sci fi like Star Wars. The best sci fi mmorpgs like EVE which after it's said and done will probably have more subs than TOR since its a steady 450k every year and they fight like dogs for every 50k worth of players. Content patches, bug fixes and customer support will easily blow anything EA has to offer out the window. it took Anarchy online 8 years to finally lose subs dispite their release problems, thats free and paying players, Ryzom has a small yet mortally dedicated fan base which keeps the heartbeat ticking they don't keep those players by being pricks.
I am not talking only in sub numbers but in philosophy, an updated version of something closer to what Ryzom did would be much more in tune with Star Wars lore than a WOW clone would. Star Wars isn't a raid grind, no one thinks of 50 foot raid bosses in Star Wars. Star Wars is not a RVR game it just deoesn't fit, and its not an Esport game, because it looks dumb on Star Wars. Star Wars is best approached as some kind of hybrid between terrestrial sandboxyness and Cyberpunk with just enough themepark thrown in the prevent full loot and corpse griefing. But World of Warcraft in space will get rejected every time.
Your post is so dead on with my own thoughts on TOR it's freaky. Everything about the game is so wrong from the ground up, it is almost as much of a case study in what not to do in a mmo than the NGE was. As big of a SW fan as i am, i never thought i would dislike something more than TOR. From a SW point of view only and not the game mechanics and systems, it teeters on being absurd to a down right joke. Then add in whats being sold on the box as a mmorpg to what it really is once opened and played, adds to the disbelief of how could a dev company with so much money for development screw up so bad of a project with the biggest IP in the world. I've said this many times. If Bioware wanted to screw up a IP, then they should have left SW alone and made a ME game instead. Leave making a mmorpg to a company that actually knows how to make a mmorpg.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Yep, apparently drop in subscription is also something to be happy about, IIRC fanboys used to say that SWTOR would be the WoW killer.
Well its great news for WOW they sit alone at the Raid gear grind throne. No one obviously wants that anymroe and the peopel that do, apparently only leave wow in 2 month intervals to blow up whatever wow clone comes out and abrubtly goes back. Sort of like an Alligator eating its own children.
It's good news for the rest of us who are sick to death of Loot Raid gear grinds and most of all annoying raiders. Raiding only got popular in the first place with "certain" players becuase they were afraid of PVP and it attracts That crowd. Having a game not follow the Everquest clone paradigm and having it be their only new gaming option is like throwing a 12 year old in general population in a Maximum security prison.
Yep, apparently drop in subscription is also something to be happy about, IIRC fanboys used to say that SWTOR would be the WoW killer.
Well its great news for WOW they sit alone at the Raid gear grind throne. No one obviously wants that anymroe and the peopel that do, apparently only leave wow in 2 month intervals to blow up whatever wow clone comes out and abrubtly goes back. Sort of like an Alligator eating its own children.
It's good news for the rest of us who are sick to death of Loot Raid gear grinds and most of all annoying raiders. Raiding only got popular in the first place with "certain" players becuase they were afraid of PVP and it attracts That crowd. Having a game not follow the Everquest clone paradigm and having it be their only new gaming option is like throwing a 12 year old in general population in a Maximum security prison.
Its not that no one wants it anymore its the case of those who do want it play wow and or rift. If any company is going to release a game with similar mechanics regardless of IP they had better make damn sure the game is up to scratch on launch day. I am continuing my sub to wow as this is where family and friends play while I play some Tera and look forward to wildstar/firefall type games as they all add something slightly different.
I highly suspect they thought they knew what they were doing when they launched the game as EA would blow the hype balloon sky high and their mouth breather fanbois would eat out of their hands in a queue across states. This didnt happen now they are being kicked in the balls and they damn well deserve it for releasing a bunch of gazzelle shit. I do feel sorry for those who are now going to loose their jobs though as they had no control of the asshats who fudged the poodle.
In true form, they still are in the first year. They got time to add things and start really turning the end-game around. However, I think Lucas Arts is to scared to deviate from thier Market Research Reports to add anything of significates to save the subs. They seem to proud of thier 4th Pillar (story and voice) to realize the game needs other things for its players to do. They probably got a Card Game in design right now even though thats not the direction to go at this point; not yet anyway. My hope is they could turn the game around like STO but try avoid the mistakes. STO really shot themselves in the foot with the whole Lock-Box Key thing.
Does he take new MMOs coming out into account or does he just draw the trend over to March 2013?
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 Best MMO Companies: Trion Worlds, ArenaNet, CCP Worst MMO Companies: Electronic Arts
Comments
Agree.
My predictions before launch were 3-5 million and I still feel they could've easily hit his mark if they just copy-pasted most of the WoW "quality of life" features, such as LFG system, Arena PVP, cross-server Warzones, good Auction house and less laggy combat and warzones.
However, they obviously didn't.
Something to keep in mind. EA's Fiscal calendar is NOT in sync with the standard calendar. They report Q4 2012 end of the month/begining of May so the estimation is for current numbers.
Shuts the crowd up? Yes clearly ONLY falling 30% of net subscribers is a victory over the haters boy that will teach them.
Enjoy your Pyrrhic victory
I think you're onto something there. One only has to look at the server status at prime time to see how it's doing. One step further, log in and servers are barren wastelands wherever you go, with the exception of the 2-4 heavy/full servers. If it weren't for the fanboism of the Star Wars/Biodrones customers, I would feel sorry for them a bit. They've been begging for server transfers/mergers for 2 months now.
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
I'm not sure but EQ might have too
The official communication is 1.7 milion somethings(active accounts, paid accounts, box sale...who knows) but what we do kn ow is that this information was given to us by corporate thugs speaking in legal fairytale buisness terms. Well the legal defination of "vast majority" can mean simply 51% + of any original number. So taking into the fact that EA has been super sketchy about there numbers its fairly easy to beleive that THEIR "Vast Majority" referss to exactly that 51+% so...
51% of 1,700,000= 867,000
867,000
this is the number that ppl should have been focusing on since its based on the only facts we have to work with.
that number sucks for a game with this much marketing...and im pretty sure its -450k that those anylysts are talking about so id put this healthy game at a whopping
450k subs!
450k subscribers with pretty much 0 chance to get things moving again thanks to the word of mouth HAMMER that has struck already.
http://www.furians.it/firme/signature.php
Quite ironic that for the past six months when people posting here used torstatus to make estimates or show declining trends, they were told you can't use torstatus as a valid way to gauge numbers. Yet now an analyst using torstatus is held to be gospel truth.
___________________________
Have flask; will travel.
one thing is sure ,my initial time card i baught ran out of time and my 30 days free is also out,and this week they put a free 1.2 access till this week-end.so real number are about to popup if they havent already!
The analyst said that the number of subs had peaked in February.
Yet in February EA said that they had 1.7M the majority of which were subs.
Whilstt in March - at the conference - EA provided the additional info that najority in February meant 'half' whereas 'now' i.e. in March the 'vast majority' of the 1.7M were through there 30 day included. Whatever EA meant - lots of discussion of course - the message in March was that subs were higher than in February.
So February would not be the peak month; does this mean the analyst is wrong or EA?
Not sure how dropping 450k subs in 1.25 years good news... but hey, at least you are keeping a positive attitude!
Enter a whole new realm of challenge and adventure.
Well whatever in your hearts you all know this is a 300k sub game at best, it's not even a good stable, 500 to 600k game. All that time and money wasted by EA just to create a reskinned NGE because they just knew the players were wrong the first time and they were gonna prove it gosh darnit.
I think these twits need to understand the Sci Fi audience is different, even campy sci fi like Star Wars. The best sci fi mmorpgs like EVE which after it's said and done will probably have more subs than TOR since its a steady 450k every year and they fight like dogs for every 50k worth of players. Content patches, bug fixes and customer support will easily blow anything EA has to offer out the window. it took Anarchy online 8 years to finally lose subs dispite their release problems, thats free and paying players, Ryzom has a small yet mortally dedicated fan base which keeps the heartbeat ticking they don't keep those players by being pricks.
I am not talking only in sub numbers but in philosophy, an updated version of something closer to what Ryzom did would be much more in tune with Star Wars lore than a WOW clone would. Star Wars isn't a raid grind, no one thinks of 50 foot raid bosses in Star Wars. Star Wars is not a RVR game it just deoesn't fit, and its not an Esport game, because it looks dumb on Star Wars. Star Wars is best approached as some kind of hybrid between terrestrial sandboxyness and Cyberpunk with just enough themepark thrown in the prevent full loot and corpse griefing. But World of Warcraft in space will get rejected every time.
Lineage, Lineage II, Maple Story, Runescape, Aion (may still be over 1 mil), Warhammer Online (briefly), Rift (briefly), EQII (briefly)
There are probably more Asian ones I am missing, but seriously people way underestimate how easy it is to get to 1 mil subs these days, at least for a short period of time.
Repeat after me:
"My name is Monorojo and I'm an addict of Bioware's kool-aid."
The "legit analyst" was giving those numbers proving what a failure TOR has been, not a "smashing retention rate." Consider that in the actual report, he gives whithering criticism of the lack of endgame. It isn't that it "lacks content." It's rather that the content is boring and pointless. Bioware could add "endgame" content, but that doesn't impact the numbers, according to your "legit analyst." In short, that that 1.2 million is the ceiling, not the floor.
Playing less isn't the equivalent of unsubbing. Far from it. Some people take breaks because of RL. But they continue being a part of the community and the game. There's a good chance they will come back. When a person unsubs, more often than not, they are gone. Those free weeks or weekends might get 40% of those people who left if they do it really successfully.
Anyone who isn't addicted to the kool-aid of his pet cause understands this distinction.
Actually it's wrong to falsify stuff used in investor information. I.e. you can't fudge numbers. Nobody is accusing EA of actually using false numbers (i.e. they are outright falsifying in official reports subscriber numbers.) What we are saying is that the PR team is spinning. Corporations do this all the time. For example, "active account" is not the same as "subscribed" or "playing the game." That is why the numbers are BS. They are true but irrelevant to the actual issue under discussion.
That once again is, what are the actual subscription numbers of people currently subscribed to the game? And then, what are the actual numbers of people playing the game over a certain period of time? If you'll notice, companies like Billzard have had no problem providing these numbers from time to time when they were launching. Why? they made the point: they had a massive hit on their hands.
I have no reason to doubt they are already close to that number now. Their recent shenanigans will guarantee that ALL of the three monthers will count for one more month.
Your post is so dead on with my own thoughts on TOR it's freaky. Everything about the game is so wrong from the ground up, it is almost as much of a case study in what not to do in a mmo than the NGE was. As big of a SW fan as i am, i never thought i would dislike something more than TOR. From a SW point of view only and not the game mechanics and systems, it teeters on being absurd to a down right joke. Then add in whats being sold on the box as a mmorpg to what it really is once opened and played, adds to the disbelief of how could a dev company with so much money for development screw up so bad of a project with the biggest IP in the world. I've said this many times. If Bioware wanted to screw up a IP, then they should have left SW alone and made a ME game instead. Leave making a mmorpg to a company that actually knows how to make a mmorpg.
Fixed !
Damn typos.
I can't watch this anymore! All these bad news make me depressed.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Yeah, I go them one further, they'll be under 500K by 1st Qtr 2013, and you'll know its true because they'll cease to report on sub numbers by then.
Sure sign a game's a loser when the company stops bragging about the actual figures.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Sounds reasonable.
Still, it makes me sad.
I so wished SWTOR would be more.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Yep, apparently drop in subscription is also something to be happy about, IIRC fanboys used to say that SWTOR would be the WoW killer.
Well its great news for WOW they sit alone at the Raid gear grind throne. No one obviously wants that anymroe and the peopel that do, apparently only leave wow in 2 month intervals to blow up whatever wow clone comes out and abrubtly goes back. Sort of like an Alligator eating its own children.
It's good news for the rest of us who are sick to death of Loot Raid gear grinds and most of all annoying raiders. Raiding only got popular in the first place with "certain" players becuase they were afraid of PVP and it attracts That crowd. Having a game not follow the Everquest clone paradigm and having it be their only new gaming option is like throwing a 12 year old in general population in a Maximum security prison.
Its not that no one wants it anymore its the case of those who do want it play wow and or rift. If any company is going to release a game with similar mechanics regardless of IP they had better make damn sure the game is up to scratch on launch day. I am continuing my sub to wow as this is where family and friends play while I play some Tera and look forward to wildstar/firefall type games as they all add something slightly different.
I highly suspect they thought they knew what they were doing when they launched the game as EA would blow the hype balloon sky high and their mouth breather fanbois would eat out of their hands in a queue across states. This didnt happen now they are being kicked in the balls and they damn well deserve it for releasing a bunch of gazzelle shit. I do feel sorry for those who are now going to loose their jobs though as they had no control of the asshats who fudged the poodle.
In true form, they still are in the first year. They got time to add things and start really turning the end-game around. However, I think Lucas Arts is to scared to deviate from thier Market Research Reports to add anything of significates to save the subs. They seem to proud of thier 4th Pillar (story and voice) to realize the game needs other things for its players to do. They probably got a Card Game in design right now even though thats not the direction to go at this point; not yet anyway. My hope is they could turn the game around like STO but try avoid the mistakes. STO really shot themselves in the foot with the whole Lock-Box Key thing.
Does he take new MMOs coming out into account or does he just draw the trend over to March 2013?
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
Best MMO Companies: Trion Worlds, ArenaNet, CCP
Worst MMO Companies: Electronic Arts
I reckon it'll be down to 450K subs by Sept this year.