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SWTOR over 500K subs as for July 31, 2012.
Souldrainer
Member Posts: 1,857
http://www.darthhater.com/articles/swtor-news/21125-electronic-arts-q1-fy13-earnings-call
2:14: Giving people choice along side subscriptions should give people plenty of options and drive players to the game. Mentioned break even point was 500,000, SWTOR is well above that but under 1 million total subscribers. Offering two-tiered pricing plan in November. For players who cancelled their subscriptions, feedback provided as they cancelled indicated that 40% were turned off by the monthly subscription fee
As was previously stated in numerous threads, 500K is the price point the game needed to stay at to remain profitable, according to Bioware.
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Comments
"subscriptions have been on a declining trajectory and have now slipped below one million. Last year we announced that the breakeven point was roughly 500,000 subscribers. And while we are well above that today, that’s not good enough. "
I love EA double speak. According to EA slipped below one million is the same as well above 500.000.
So.... 500,001 gotcha.
What they failed to mention was that they can remain profitable at 500K subs IF they...
1. Layoff a large portion of their team.
2. Convert to the F2P model.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
Funny... the feedback on most forums is people wouldn't play it EVEN if it was free to play.
Personally I wouldn't give it room on my hard drive now.
Yeah sure they are above 500k....
And sure they are going F2P because players want so.... LOL
They are well below 500k and they are going F2P cuse they have no choice.... god damn liars.
2:03: Disappointing performance of Star Wars: The Old Republic was offset by powerful performance of Battlefield 3.
They really think people are going to believe that? No sane person would believe that spin.
It's Been a good popcorn day. you should risk your sanity and visit the TOR forums. unreal I can't keep up with the people posting over there.
But yeah, we all knew this day was coming.
Utter bs on the 5ook+ subs be lucky if they have 100k lol .
i guess that it will be good for peeps that wanna try the game; however, get ready for a huge install of voiceovers
I thought they said they had no intentions of going free to play...
I love EA, so 40% (not a majority) of the player feedback was that they were turned off by the subscription model...
Now, any normal business person actually looking for the real reason the game was such a dismal failure would go "hrmm, we lost 70% or so of our subscription base in less than 6 months. Obviously its because we released a crappy product, perhaps we should try to fix said product.
Instead EA goes "Well, we'll just ignore the 60% who didnt mind the sub model and blame the games failure on the subscription model... and assume that F2P will keep us alive".
Good luck with that buddy.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Yeah ofc they would not play it EVEN as F2P... because there was nothing wrong with the game having Sub model...
The problem was with the game lacking everything a good MMO needs, and going F2P wont fix that at all...
it might just drive their current subs away.
Im curious what do you guys mean by the sky is falling. As in, they are saying this news is good news or they're actually finally realizing the game is not the resounding success they thought it was?
I would go read it myself, but im at work and i dont need to ruin the rest of my day by going to the offiicial forums.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no chance ToR has 500k players. They have 16 total servers left (12 NA and 4 Euro.). At launch they had 210 serevrs that were all full with 1.7 million playing on them. Now they have 16 total servers which is 7% of that total. For comparisons EQ2 afrter its merger had 16 total servers and its population was toppint at 200k. With 7& of servers left assuming the same number and same log in time that would be 120k total population. Although thats not a fair comparison as players play a lot more at release and the servers now are only half as full as they were at release.
The number is likely somewhere between 150k-250k. No chance on 500k.
"Our diversity allows us to make up for a miss on one franchise (SWTOR) with a hit on another (BF3)."
Niiiiiiiiiiiceeeee
Anyone still arguing SWTOR is success?
Note that there are still quite a few subs running, and player isnt active any more and have no intention on continuing sub.
The REAL nuber of subs (as i mentioned few months ago) will be known in september when all long term+free given time expires.
And THAT number isnt good enough for EA.
And how do they know that magic number? Easy. Number of players that actually transferred their characters and continued to play-expected dropoff of those+observed success of free trial.
I actually have to agree with him, all speculation aside, just doing the math:
16 serves with 500k subs is 31250 people per server. I remember Bioware saying they upped the capacity of people online at any time before its *full* to be around 4500 concurrent players.
So, if they're not lying through their teeth then even being generous and saying each server can support 6750 people online at the same time, thats less than 1/4 of their per server playerbase able to login in at the same time?
I'm sorry but i have to call BS.
I'm willing to bet that EA is including all of those trial accounts as "subscriptions" in their numbers. Thats the only way the 500k could make any sense
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
They can say that as of now they have above 500k but they know it's well below it. They've counted free trials and anyone that used a cc or gametime as subscribers before. Also people with6 month dubs like my husband that were given a free month will be gone and they know that too. They consolidate servers and continue to sink. They're never going to admit they had no clue how to make a successful mmo because their egos wont let them. Its kind of humorous.
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
Even if its 700k people left thats what?, 1.7-1.9mil dropped (based on box sales at last check 2.4mil+) and will drop further as the rage quitters will leave in droves and not return when F2P hits as they find new games to get into.
Star Wars Galaxies relaunch by December 2012
damage control it is; the key word is "expanding"; and the official forums? in rage mode
I just listened to their investor confrence call. A whole lot of nonanswers. The highlight was when Goldman Sachs said EA's number crunching looked dodgy EA hung up on them.
They never announced SWTOR's sub numbers other then under one million. They did suggest that the FTP model was an attempt to "claw back" the "churn" of cancelled subscriptions. EA also said they expected revenue from subs and microtransactions to be comparable in dollars.
EA also stated that "We don't expect Star Wars free to play revenue to be incremental to the other things we've listed."
In other words, EA is distancing itself from SWTOR as much as it can and further lowering it as a priority for EA.
EA has also anounced they will buy back $500 million in EA stock. If you want to be a uber-hater, you could say thet EA has to buyback stock because SWTOR 's failure halved their stock value. So if you say that SWTOR cost $500 million in production and marketing, and the stock buyback is an additional $500 million; SWTOR is now a billion dollar mistake.
That may or may not be true. Didn't they increase the population cap on each server by a large amount? So it is possible to have over 500k.Anyway I won't be playing even after it goes f2p. I played beta and was bored after reaching lvl 5. If they had made a swg2.0 with no bugs I'm sure I'd be subbing and keeping their numbers of subs well above 2mil. We can only wonder what would have been I guess.
hahahhahahahha.... just ran my SWTOR launcher, and yeah this ''EXPANDING'' made me LOL so hard !
All I know is there's some serious servings of humble pie going around today.
Even I didn't count on things going so fast as they did in about 7-8 months after launch.
Very sketchy. The lack of concrete sub numbers means they don't want the exact loss in subs to be out there. My guess was 650-700K before the announcement.