"$60 (I’m rolling in CE, DCE and regular boxes all in here) - that means $102 million in BioWare’s pockets at the get-go."
Fanboi or just stupid? Hard to say.
on retail sales a company genrally only gets back 25% of a games sale price. But with digital sales the percentage the devloper recives has gone up quite a bit as recently over 50% of MMO release sales have come from digital sales. Likely the number retained by BW from intial sales is closer to $50-60 million rather than the traditional 25-30 million they would have recieved fron only retail sales. But it is still far below their development copsts whther you beleive its $200 milion or $500 million.
One thing that is for certain is that we all know it wasn't the success they had hoped for as no-one put's a lot of time and effort into a product just to break even.
In my book, that doesn't make it a success and the way thing's are going, it isn't going to make them a great deal of profit either.
Every MMO I've ever played had people griping on the forums. If I was to pick the worse of the bunch that I've played I would have to go with STO. That place exploded after launch with massive numbers of "I QUIT" threads and mods banning people left and right. I didn't really notice much negativity in TOR's forums until the release of 1.2. Since then it's been mostly reasonable requests for things that could improve the game .You have the occasional douchebag that pops in from time to time but overall I'd say the TOR forums are as good as you'll ever see on a gaming site. This guy that wrote the article needs to get a grip.
Originally posted by Istavaan Originally posted by busdriver "$60 (Im rolling in CE, DCE and regular boxes all in here) - that means $102 million in BioWares pockets at the get-go." Fanboi or just stupid? Hard to say.
40% of that goes to LA right off the bat.
No, it actually doesn't. Not until EA/Bioware has recouped their development costs.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Originally posted by busdriver "$60 (I’m rolling in CE, DCE and regular boxes all in here) - that means $102 million in BioWare’s pockets at the get-go." Fanboi or just stupid? Hard to say.
40% of that goes to LA right off the bat.
No, it actually doesn't. Not until EA/Bioware has recouped their development costs.
Wouldn't it just be fantastic if LA ended up getting nothing for SWTOR?
Originally posted by busdriver "$60 (I’m rolling in CE, DCE and regular boxes all in here) - that means $102 million in BioWare’s pockets at the get-go." Fanboi or just stupid? Hard to say.
40% of that goes to LA right off the bat.
No, it actually doesn't. Not until EA/Bioware has recouped their development costs.
Wouldn't it just be fantastic if LA ended up getting nothing for SWTOR?
75% of the sale price goes to the retailer gamestop, best boy or whoemever.
Originally posted by busdriver "$60 (I’m rolling in CE, DCE and regular boxes all in here) - that means $102 million in BioWare’s pockets at the get-go." Fanboi or just stupid? Hard to say.
40% of that goes to LA right off the bat.
No, it actually doesn't. Not until EA/Bioware has recouped their development costs.
This game will be profitable if not already. And I'm saying this as someone who just cancelled recently to play Tera. You guys with your numbers just don't seem to get it. 1.3 millions subs is A LOT. People get blinded by the WoW numbers and think that if a game doesn't have 5 million subs that it's a failure. No game but WoW has over 5 million subs or even close for that matter.
TOR will probably settle around 700-800K subs within this year and guess what? That would still be really impressive. That is plenty of players. Of course they will need to do something about the 400 servers they have, but they have even said, they need about 500K to be profitable.
I mean hell, I played eq2 for about three years and they were sporting on average around 200K subs. And it was profitable. Enough so that the damn game is still around. In fact, it's probably went up to around 450K since it went free and has new life to it.
All in all, in the current market, I would call it a sucess in my opinion.
NOOoo that free time was counted in that 1.3 million subs. Before you say prove it, I say prove it's not.
Originally posted by busdriver "$60 (I’m rolling in CE, DCE and regular boxes all in here) - that means $102 million in BioWare’s pockets at the get-go." Fanboi or just stupid? Hard to say.
40% of that goes to LA right off the bat.
No, it actually doesn't. Not until EA/Bioware has recouped their development costs.
Wouldn't it just be fantastic if LA ended up getting nothing for SWTOR?
On behalf of all SWG fanboys, I'll just say priceless.
Interestingly enough, on a recent boring road-trip I started doing calculations in my head about TOR's income. My conclusions were pretty much the same with only a minor change: I'm pretty sure they said they had sold over 2 million copies at the same time they announced the 1.7m sub number (which, btw, was before the Oceanic launch).
I do think they are close to, if not already, making small profit on this one. Not the kind of monies a publisher like EA wants, and probably so small that it facilitated the recent layoffs.
So, I may be the only one here that agrees with his numbers, but I do think he's close.
He's not close at all.
EA themselves never said - as the OP said - that they had '1.7 m subs'. What EA said was that they had '1.7 active accounts'. It has already been established - and confirmed by EA - that this figure includes trial accounts and accounts undergoing their free month. This applies to the later figure of 1.3 m too.
EA have been very sly about the sub figures it has released - primarily to shore up its sinking share price, I assume.
I guess it's convenient to forget that the game cost well over $200M to develop. Nearer to 200M than to 300M, but considerably more than 200M, at least if the guys running TOR know what they're talking about. Let's take a rough estimate of 230M. I doubt they're out of the woods just yet. It brings in more money than it costs to keep it going. And then you still factor in $0 of the huge BW acquisition cost into TOR.
And we also assume LA doesn't get a cent until EA breaks even. Even the current reduced dev team + the grossly overpaid leads + the marketing campaign still costs them money, quite a lot of money too. They have to bring in considerably more than $230M, easily around $350M, before they really break even.
They'll have a turn a profit first, before it could be called a success. I don't see that happening just yet, if ever.
Can you post where you read those numbers from Bioware? You seem very sure about them, so surely you have some sort of information that the rest of us do not have. You seem to know the salaries of the employees now also...lol. You make a lot of assumptions with absolutely no evidence to back this shit up. Nice internets win.
Thanks,
I'm sure about the numbers, my memory is just fine with numbers. The name of the guy giving the interview however. Was it Ohlen, Dickinson, Riccitiello or the CFO that quit a week after he claimed SWTOR was a success? Dunno, don't care, not even relevant.
The budget was $150M, before they ran into some unexpected problems, taking it over $200 but nowhere near the $300M speculation that was going around at the time. That's the gist of what he said on SWTOR cost.
If you want to find them and they're still there you'll find them. If your job is to take those numbers offline, I'm not going to help you do your job for you. So do what you must about this 'shit'.
Make a profit, but nothing to write home about, with 1M subs for some - unspecified - time. Debate in articles suggested 1 to 2 years depending on advertising, sales, level of subs etc. etc.
So currently:
Running costs being covered - at least until the start of the 30-day free period. Now?
Made a profit? Based on what EA have said: no.
And if the writer of the post (not the OP) ever goes into business can I hire him to sell goods for me based on his logic. I get 100% and he apys all the taxes, sales costs, he pays the people to make the goods and the cost of the material. I predict the OP will be in great demand and will put Amazon and Wal-mart out of business - or go bankrupt of course.
Is he talking about the game that barely anyone purchased because it came pachaged with the wii? I'm just confused, because nintendo didn't actually sell a hell of a lot of copies of that game, because it was, you know, a part of a pachage and the game was free.
And bioware didn't make a penny off of ToR, not even today. EA makes money of the game and they give BW an amount of money to work with. And not even EA made, even on an average, of $60 per box sold. That would mean that at least half of all copies sold were CE's and that it cost them next to nothing to produce.
Somethng a lot of people don't realize. Games aren't a pay on scan item for just about all retailers. Pay on scan items are items that a retailer only pay for if the item is actually sold. Retailers, almost always, have to purchase the game from the distributor. If they don't sell it they don't get reimbursed, that's why you see games go into bargain bins, the distributor won't take it back. The cost in the store reflects the retailers markup.
There is no way in th world that EA makes $60 off a box sale, no game company does.
At least according to this article so thought some folks may enjoy the read. I don't agree with the acticle or his numbers honestly but thought it an interesting attempt...err....read.
blah, blah, blah, wall of text that's wrong from start to finish...
On the odd chance you are the same individual who wrote the blog post, I did leave a response to the horrible analysis on the blog from whence it came. If you are not, rebutting your entirely wrong analysis would take me more column inches to fix it than it's worth and you can just see what I wrote about the laughable financial analysis that was done... I'm just too tired to fight that mass of complete wrong twice in one day.
Retailers take the biggest profit off of boxed copies where as digital copies are obviously full profit as it's via Origin.
However constant development of hundreds of people isn't cheap and you have bills to pay and that could be 5 million a month.......
SWTOR isn't profitable in the slightest yet.
Yeah. It was one of the worst fanboy analysis of the game I've ever seen. I left a more detailed post on the blog it came from. It was so bad that its 'not even wrong' and a very long article could be written about everything wrong with the post, from the first premise to the last wrong conclusion.
The phrase was coined by theoretical physicistWolfgang Pauli, who was known for his colorful objections to incorrect or sloppy thinking.Rudolf Peierlswrites that "a friend showed Pauli the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli's views. Pauli remarked sadly, 'It is not even wrong.' "
It really left me depressed. How could you be so wrong. That you didn't even think of a single cost. That you weren't even aware of the difference between retail and wholesale. I mean, how the heck does Target or Walmart or Safeway or any other retail store make it's money? Does this guy even know that they pay less for the products than they sell them for?
I guess it's convenient to forget that the game cost well over $200M to develop. Nearer to 200M than to 300M, but considerably more than 200M, at least if the guys running TOR know what they're talking about. Let's take a rough estimate of 230M. I doubt they're out of the woods just yet. It brings in more money than it costs to keep it going. And then you still factor in $0 of the huge BW acquisition cost into TOR.
And we also assume LA doesn't get a cent until EA breaks even. Even the current reduced dev team + the grossly overpaid leads + the marketing campaign still costs them money, quite a lot of money too. They have to bring in considerably more than $230M, easily around $350M, before they really break even.
They'll have a turn a profit first, before it could be called a success. I don't see that happening just yet, if ever.
Can you post where you read those numbers from Bioware? You seem very sure about them, so surely you have some sort of information that the rest of us do not have. You seem to know the salaries of the employees now also...lol. You make a lot of assumptions with absolutely no evidence to back this shit up. Nice internets win.
Thanks,
I'm sure about the numbers, my memory is just fine with numbers. The name of the guy giving the interview however. Was it Ohlen, Dickinson, Riccitiello or the CFO that quit a week after he claimed SWTOR was a success? Dunno, don't care, not even relevant.
The budget was $150M, before they ran into some unexpected problems, taking it over $200 but nowhere near the $300M speculation that was going around at the time. That's the gist of what he said on SWTOR cost.
If you want to find them and they're still there you'll find them. If your job is to take those numbers offline, I'm not going to help you do your job for you. So do what you must about this 'shit'.
I remember reading the same thing. Also, I remember that BioWare had gotten a lot of the money as a royalty advance from LA, plus they put in a lot of their own money. But EA had to drop in another $80 million to finish it.
So, EA directly, is only into the MMO for $80 million. And it's NOT the lion's share of the costs which were born by LA in production advances.
The author of that piece is either ignorant or just a pure fanboy (hate to use that word)
Look, they spent what, 160mill? and several years on this investment, their ROI is horrible to say the least, EA could have spent the money on several other places, and made alot more money than they did, that calls for a complete failure, obviously this game won't be pulling in money for them for several years.
I'm sure they would have prefered a mmo that would have been able to pull some 2 mill subs, they didnt get that, thats a terrible investment.
I'm surprised to see that some people are defending the game as much as they are, it's a mmo, had they sold it as a Diablo like game (single player with online coop), it would probably had done better, and not dissapointed as many people as it did.
Look, if you buy a mobile home and get a van, you'd be pretty upset too, especially when you've been told for years, that it's a new mobile home and it's going to rock! and that's all there is to it, SWTOR is a terrible mmorpg.
People also need to be aware of the difference on mmoRPG's and single player RPG's, the mmorpg's I've played, the RPG part were contributed by the players, not by cutscenes, cutscenes are fun for singleplayer games, and should stay there.
I'm not surprised that the single player crowd love the game, it is a decent single player game, heck I probably would have enjoyed more aswell, had they not announced it as a mmo, and left out mmo parts, which are just terrible in the game.
An MMO success to me is : 1 (One, Uno) server at max capacity.. Yes even if that server capacity is 20 people, if you have all 20 spots on that one server full at least 1/4th of every day then you are successful..
Lets be honest, not everybody in a band is a rockstar.. When they perform in front of a fan base of even 30 people, it can be considered a success..
It is a failure on a bigger scale than the endless pockets of EA can salvage because of the damage it has done to their reputation (not that EA has a good one to start with).
How many people will buy another MMO by them now? I can bet that it has put a dent in any future Mass Effect MMO project too as many people live by the 'once bitten, twice shy' motto like myself.
An MMO success to me is : 1 (One, Uno) server at max capacity.. Yes even if that server capacity is 20 people, if you have all 20 spots on that one server full at least 1/4th of every day then you are successful..
Lets be honest, not everybody in a band is a rockstar.. When they perform in front of a fan base of even 30 people, it can be considered a success..
Go invest $200 million on some MMO and then say that again.
So, you do not know what they spent to make the game and....
You do not know how much they made, leaving out several factors that influence the "profit".
Leaving your summary on the success of a game and/or its profitability a total SWAG and not based on anything concrete or even remotely concrete. Are you perhaps a Statistician?
Comments
Stop saying bioware, its EA .
Pretty much this. If you can blow holes in an argument on the very first calculation mentioned, then it's not even worth reading the rest.
Enter a whole new realm of challenge and adventure.
One thing that is for certain is that we all know it wasn't the success they had hoped for as no-one put's a lot of time and effort into a product just to break even.
In my book, that doesn't make it a success and the way thing's are going, it isn't going to make them a great deal of profit either.
Both could be a possibility.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
Every MMO I've ever played had people griping on the forums. If I was to pick the worse of the bunch that I've played I would have to go with STO. That place exploded after launch with massive numbers of "I QUIT" threads and mods banning people left and right. I didn't really notice much negativity in TOR's forums until the release of 1.2. Since then it's been mostly reasonable requests for things that could improve the game .You have the occasional douchebag that pops in from time to time but overall I'd say the TOR forums are as good as you'll ever see on a gaming site. This guy that wrote the article needs to get a grip.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
No, it actually doesn't. Not until EA/Bioware has recouped their development costs.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Wouldn't it just be fantastic if LA ended up getting nothing for SWTOR?
75% of the sale price goes to the retailer gamestop, best boy or whoemever.
development costs of 200 million, yeah sure bro.
NOOoo that free time was counted in that 1.3 million subs. Before you say prove it, I say prove it's not.
On behalf of all SWG fanboys, I'll just say priceless.
Found this pic of EA giving a press conference on TOR after the layoffs and decline in subs:
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
He's not close at all.
EA themselves never said - as the OP said - that they had '1.7 m subs'. What EA said was that they had '1.7 active accounts'. It has already been established - and confirmed by EA - that this figure includes trial accounts and accounts undergoing their free month. This applies to the later figure of 1.3 m too.
EA have been very sly about the sub figures it has released - primarily to shore up its sinking share price, I assume.
I'm sure about the numbers, my memory is just fine with numbers. The name of the guy giving the interview however. Was it Ohlen, Dickinson, Riccitiello or the CFO that quit a week after he claimed SWTOR was a success? Dunno, don't care, not even relevant.
The budget was $150M, before they ran into some unexpected problems, taking it over $200 but nowhere near the $300M speculation that was going around at the time. That's the gist of what he said on SWTOR cost.
If you want to find them and they're still there you'll find them. If your job is to take those numbers offline, I'm not going to help you do your job for you. So do what you must about this 'shit'.
Financially EA have said:
Cover running costs at 500k subscibers.
Make a profit, but nothing to write home about, with 1M subs for some - unspecified - time. Debate in articles suggested 1 to 2 years depending on advertising, sales, level of subs etc. etc.
So currently:
Running costs being covered - at least until the start of the 30-day free period. Now?
Made a profit? Based on what EA have said: no.
And if the writer of the post (not the OP) ever goes into business can I hire him to sell goods for me based on his logic. I get 100% and he apys all the taxes, sales costs, he pays the people to make the goods and the cost of the material. I predict the OP will be in great demand and will put Amazon and Wal-mart out of business - or go bankrupt of course.
Bioware
EA
LA
All take a share
Retailers take the biggest profit off of boxed copies where as digital copies are obviously full profit as it's via Origin.
However constant development of hundreds of people isn't cheap and you have bills to pay and that could be 5 million a month.......
SWTOR isn't profitable in the slightest yet.
I don't understand the part about wii sports.
Is he talking about the game that barely anyone purchased because it came pachaged with the wii? I'm just confused, because nintendo didn't actually sell a hell of a lot of copies of that game, because it was, you know, a part of a pachage and the game was free.
And bioware didn't make a penny off of ToR, not even today. EA makes money of the game and they give BW an amount of money to work with. And not even EA made, even on an average, of $60 per box sold. That would mean that at least half of all copies sold were CE's and that it cost them next to nothing to produce.
Somethng a lot of people don't realize. Games aren't a pay on scan item for just about all retailers. Pay on scan items are items that a retailer only pay for if the item is actually sold. Retailers, almost always, have to purchase the game from the distributor. If they don't sell it they don't get reimbursed, that's why you see games go into bargain bins, the distributor won't take it back. The cost in the store reflects the retailers markup.
There is no way in th world that EA makes $60 off a box sale, no game company does.
On the odd chance you are the same individual who wrote the blog post, I did leave a response to the horrible analysis on the blog from whence it came. If you are not, rebutting your entirely wrong analysis would take me more column inches to fix it than it's worth and you can just see what I wrote about the laughable financial analysis that was done... I'm just too tired to fight that mass of complete wrong twice in one day.
Yeah. It was one of the worst fanboy analysis of the game I've ever seen. I left a more detailed post on the blog it came from. It was so bad that its 'not even wrong' and a very long article could be written about everything wrong with the post, from the first premise to the last wrong conclusion.
The phrase was coined by theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who was known for his colorful objections to incorrect or sloppy thinking. Rudolf Peierls writes that "a friend showed Pauli the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli's views. Pauli remarked sadly, 'It is not even wrong.' "
It really left me depressed. How could you be so wrong. That you didn't even think of a single cost. That you weren't even aware of the difference between retail and wholesale. I mean, how the heck does Target or Walmart or Safeway or any other retail store make it's money? Does this guy even know that they pay less for the products than they sell them for?
Ugh.
I remember reading the same thing. Also, I remember that BioWare had gotten a lot of the money as a royalty advance from LA, plus they put in a lot of their own money. But EA had to drop in another $80 million to finish it.
So, EA directly, is only into the MMO for $80 million. And it's NOT the lion's share of the costs which were born by LA in production advances.
The author of that piece is either ignorant or just a pure fanboy (hate to use that word)
Look, they spent what, 160mill? and several years on this investment, their ROI is horrible to say the least, EA could have spent the money on several other places, and made alot more money than they did, that calls for a complete failure, obviously this game won't be pulling in money for them for several years.
I'm sure they would have prefered a mmo that would have been able to pull some 2 mill subs, they didnt get that, thats a terrible investment.
I'm surprised to see that some people are defending the game as much as they are, it's a mmo, had they sold it as a Diablo like game (single player with online coop), it would probably had done better, and not dissapointed as many people as it did.
Look, if you buy a mobile home and get a van, you'd be pretty upset too, especially when you've been told for years, that it's a new mobile home and it's going to rock! and that's all there is to it, SWTOR is a terrible mmorpg.
People also need to be aware of the difference on mmoRPG's and single player RPG's, the mmorpg's I've played, the RPG part were contributed by the players, not by cutscenes, cutscenes are fun for singleplayer games, and should stay there.
I'm not surprised that the single player crowd love the game, it is a decent single player game, heck I probably would have enjoyed more aswell, had they not announced it as a mmo, and left out mmo parts, which are just terrible in the game.
An MMO success to me is : 1 (One, Uno) server at max capacity.. Yes even if that server capacity is 20 people, if you have all 20 spots on that one server full at least 1/4th of every day then you are successful..
Lets be honest, not everybody in a band is a rockstar.. When they perform in front of a fan base of even 30 people, it can be considered a success..
It is a failure on a bigger scale than the endless pockets of EA can salvage because of the damage it has done to their reputation (not that EA has a good one to start with).
How many people will buy another MMO by them now? I can bet that it has put a dent in any future Mass Effect MMO project too as many people live by the 'once bitten, twice shy' motto like myself.
Go invest $200 million on some MMO and then say that again.
So, you do not know what they spent to make the game and....
You do not know how much they made, leaving out several factors that influence the "profit".
Leaving your summary on the success of a game and/or its profitability a total SWAG and not based on anything concrete or even remotely concrete. Are you perhaps a Statistician?