So then I did this math here you will love this everyone !
12 months x $15 per month = $180 ( 1 account subbed per year )
$139,000,000 / $180 = 772,222
So the F2P ( cash shop et all ) gave SWTOR the equivalent of 772,222 subscribers for the year 2013.
Not sure how many subbs we have ATM but yeah seems a decent amount of money none the less.
I think we have between 300,000 and 500,000 subbs though but this sentence is IMO only , the rest is math.
Cheers,
BadOrb.
Exactly. Which shows that the number is a guess as they also said that it is predominantly a sub based game. i.e. they are making more money from subs. So if the data is 100% accurate SWTOR must have more than 772k subs.
(I am actually amazed that they have all these people supplying them with their spending habits tbh.)
As o how many subscribers SWTOR has I reckon less but EA have said very little. However:
1. Ohlsen did say that subs were going up after the f2p option - dangerous to use such comments but assuming that was the case then pre-f2p launch the game had less than 500k. Since in May EA announced just under 500k. Inflated by the Makeb discount no doubt.
2. And in August the CFO said had lost 25% of their pre-F2P number - so max number would be 75% of 500k or 375k. That assumes the game had 500k at the launch of the f2p option though so leaves no room for the subs are going up comment.
The other comments of course are when Ohlsen announced 2M new accounts last April and then last May we found the game had 1.7M + 500k. Which suggests that the game was down to 200k pre-f2p. And 75% of 200k would be 150k.
Back to the $139M. Their assessment says SWTOR is predominantly a subscriber based game. But if so it has more subs by a long way than EA have said. Bottomline its a guess based on a sample and some assumption. But please sign up to their service at a very reasonable cost!!!!!
i am not playing this right now but its been obvious since F2P and the server merges went live that this game has been successful.
tons of people play and there are tons of cartel items that are in the game which people bought.
just another reason why you should never listen to people here, the vast majority of opinions here are biased.
and they say "fanboi's" are a cancer to gaming? if that is so, then what does that make "haters" that spread false information because they are still pissed it isn't the game they wanted? the black plague of gaming?
it isn't just swtor either, i see this crap all over these forums.
i am not playing this right now but its been obvious since F2P and the server merges went live that this game has been successful.tons of people play and there are tons of cartel items that are in the game which people bought.just another reason why you should never listen to people here, the vast majority of opinions here are biased.and they say "fanboi's" are a cancer to gaming? if that is so, then what does that make "haters" that spread false information because they are still pissed it isn't the game they wanted? the black plague of gaming?it isn't just swtor either, i see this crap all over these forums.
Very true. Fans of WOW have been dealing with these type of people for years. The game wasn't my cup of tea but I never spent my free time crying on their forums about why the game sucks..That's just rude and disrespectful to the people who are there to actually discuss current events with the game.
We know from start that the initail costs of the game ie the budget was covered by the boxed sales of the game.
No.
Old ground so keep things short.
- EA do not get 100% of the cost of physical sales. Retailers, tax, distribution costs etc. etc.
- Analysts, the ones who go to the EA conference calls, estimated that EA would make $60m on 2M sales.
- Funcom, in a financial presentation post AoC, said that they made between 20-24% of the box price (varied by country). So something over $10 a box maybe.
- EA got a bigger % because a) they distributed the game - so got two bites at the cherry and b) there was a mix of physical and online sales via Origin
- Box price in Europe was sub-$50 on Amazon etc, of which c. 20% was tax, and the price went down post Christmas.
Hard to argue with the $60M figure though; maybe it was $55M maybe $65M but about right.
Yes EA eventually announced 2.4M through sales and they will have sold extra boxes to retailers that were probably never sold but unless you believe SWTOR cost less than $100M it is pretty clear that box sales did not cover the cost of the game.
And lets not go down the how much the game cost debate. Somewhere in there is the cost of buying Bioware. Factor that in and the cost of SWTORs goes way up.
And lets not go down the how much the game cost debate. Somewhere in there is the cost of buying Bioware. Factor that in and the cost of SWTORs goes way up.
Goes up? Sure. As much as you are implying? No, they were also buying the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series, and Mass Effect 3 wasn't exactly a flop.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me.
We know from start that the initail costs of the game ie the budget was covered by the boxed sales of the game.
No.
Old ground so keep things short.
- EA do not get 100% of the cost of physical sales. Retailers, tax, distribution costs etc. etc.
- Analysts, the ones who go to the EA conference calls, estimated that EA would make $60m on 2M sales.
- Funcom, in a financial presentation post AoC, said that they made between 20-24% of the box price (varied by country). So something over $10 a box maybe.
- EA got a bigger % because a) they distributed the game - so got two bites at the cherry and b) there was a mix of physical and online sales via Origin
- Box price in Europe was sub-$50 on Amazon etc, of which c. 20% was tax, and the price went down post Christmas.
Hard to argue with the $60M figure though; maybe it was $55M maybe $65M but about right.
Yes EA eventually announced 2.4M through sales and they will have sold extra boxes to retailers that were probably never sold but unless you believe SWTOR cost less than $100M it is pretty clear that box sales did not cover the cost of the game.
And lets not go down the how much the game cost debate. Somewhere in there is the cost of buying Bioware. Factor that in and the cost of SWTORs goes way up.
It's amazing how wrong you often are. The biggest part of the 2.4 million wasn't boxed sales but digital copies. Digital copies EA gets 100% of the sale.
It was stated actually at GDC that the cost of the game was completely covered by the intial sales of the game and that EA made sure it always turned a profit hence the firing of employees when the subscrptions dropped.
It is amazing at how much you hate this game that you will go to great lengths to lie.
We know from start that the initail costs of the game ie the budget was covered by the boxed sales of the game.
No.
Old ground so keep things short.
- EA do not get 100% of the cost of physical sales. Retailers, tax, distribution costs etc. etc.
- Analysts, the ones who go to the EA conference calls, estimated that EA would make $60m on 2M sales.
- Funcom, in a financial presentation post AoC, said that they made between 20-24% of the box price (varied by country). So something over $10 a box maybe.
- EA got a bigger % because a) they distributed the game - so got two bites at the cherry and b) there was a mix of physical and online sales via Origin
- Box price in Europe was sub-$50 on Amazon etc, of which c. 20% was tax, and the price went down post Christmas.
Hard to argue with the $60M figure though; maybe it was $55M maybe $65M but about right.
Yes EA eventually announced 2.4M through sales and they will have sold extra boxes to retailers that were probably never sold but unless you believe SWTOR cost less than $100M it is pretty clear that box sales did not cover the cost of the game.
And lets not go down the how much the game cost debate. Somewhere in there is the cost of buying Bioware. Factor that in and the cost of SWTORs goes way up.
It's amazing how wrong you often are. The biggest part of the 2.4 million wasn't boxed sales but digital copies. Digital copies EA gets 100% of the sale.
It was stated actually at GDC that the cost of the game was completely covered by the intial sales of the game and that EA made sure it always turned a profit hence the firing of employees when the subscrptions dropped.
It is amazing at how much you hate this game that you will go to great lengths to lie.
DRIVEL!
EA get 100% of the sale? Really. No sales taxes to pay. No salaries. No website costs. No building to pay for. No electricity. No telecoms. No marketing costs. Do I need to carry on to demonstrate how uninformed you are.
As far as the percentage of online to retail sales there was an analyst question post launch - paraphrase: was it 50/50, EA answer: done a little better. One could almost believe that the analysts who attend EA's conference calls had allowed for Origin. Taken that into account when they estimated $60M from 2M sales.
Obviously however the analysts did not have the wisdom of GDC. They were not indoctrinated. Shame on them for lying.
Indeed how could EA manage to make a loss given what was said at GDC. Given your drivel about keeping 100$ of sales comment however there is no point discussing corporate profit and costs.
In fact as you believe 100% of sales goes to EA better if you don't talk about costs or profit at all in the future.
"It is amazing at how much you love this game that you will go to great lengths to lie."
See what I did there. I don't hate the game but you seem smitten with glamour. And don't understand. Keep 100% of sales indeed.
And lets not go down the how much the game cost debate. Somewhere in there is the cost of buying Bioware. Factor that in and the cost of SWTORs goes way up.
Goes up? Sure. As much as you are implying? No, they were also buying the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series, and Mass Effect 3 wasn't exactly a flop.
The cost debate I was thinking of was "Bioware having the SWTOR IP and the potential to make WoW-esque money" was a big pat of the purchase price.
At the time I took a simpler view. The headline purchase cost was $860M but I considered the stock options to be paid for by EA shareholders rather than EA corporate. Lower figure: c. $640M. (from SEC filings).
Then I simply amortized the $640M across the number of games published giving a figure of c. $60M per game. At the time it was 10 or 11 games published depending on whether Mass Effect was a Bioware or an EA Bioware game.
What is really sad is that Bioware have only published one new title of late: Mass Effect 3.
Call it 12 titles (counting Mass Effect, excluding Hutt) and you come up with each game having to absorb $53M of costs.
(If you count Hutt Cartel you can get the number down to c. $50M but that means that you are saying that Hutt Cartel cost $50M over and above whatever it cost internally to make).
There will have been hundreds of pages justifying the cost of the takeover; each game in the pipeline will have had a potential to make money. And yes there will have been some bricks and mortar stuff. That is the debate. Did SWTOR merit a bigger share of the cost than other games? did it have a bigger potential? Probably but whatever the values at the end of the day the "$640M" has to be recovered through the products that are sold: in this case a small handful of games.
EA get 100% of the sale? Really. No sales taxes to pay.
This pretty much sums it up right here. Yeah if you don't understand what is wrong with what you said right there then you clearly are the most uninformed person here.
If you know what is wrong with it then you clearly lied.
Yes they made back their entire production budget back from the intial sales. It's amazing that someone is still trying to claim otherwise. But there you go not much sense in the "hater" group.
EA get 100% of the sale? Really. No sales taxes to pay.
This pretty much sums it up right here. Yeah if you don't understand what is wrong with what you said right there then you clearly are the most uninformed person here.
If you know what is wrong with it then you clearly lied.
Yes they made back their entire production budget back from the intial sales. It's amazing that someone is still trying to claim otherwise. But there you go not much sense in the "hater" group.
I'm not familiar with this part of SWToR's history. Did someone from EA say this, or are we just assuming this? I don't think we can really know this unless we know how much they actually spent, and nobody really seems to know.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
What this report says. Nexon makes a shitload of money. 1st, 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 10th are all Nexon owned games. (Nexon owns NCSoft now). It also says $100 million AAA MMOs are not worth it.
EA get 100% of the sale? Really. No sales taxes to pay.
This pretty much sums it up right here. Yeah if you don't understand what is wrong with what you said right there then you clearly are the most uninformed person here.
If you know what is wrong with it then you clearly lied.
Yes they made back their entire production budget back from the intial sales. It's amazing that someone is still trying to claim otherwise. But there you go not much sense in the "hater" group.
I'm not familiar with this part of SWToR's history. Did someone from EA say this, or are we just assuming this? I don't think we can really know this unless we know how much they actually spent, and nobody really seems to know.
they sold at least 2 million boxes ( 1 million in 3 days 1.7 mil subs at peak ) and maintained over 1 million subs for the first 5 months. The wiki lists the development costs between 150-250 million, people guessing higher are just guessing. Any other number without a factual source is just someone guessing.
At this point it's a pretty weak argument to say they haven't made that amount back. It probably isn't buying them all yachts, but it's making money.
EA get 100% of the sale? Really. No sales taxes to pay.
This pretty much sums it up right here. Yeah if you don't understand what is wrong with what you said right there then you clearly are the most uninformed person here.
If you know what is wrong with it then you clearly lied.
Yes they made back their entire production budget back from the intial sales. It's amazing that someone is still trying to claim otherwise. But there you go not much sense in the "hater" group.
I'm not familiar with this part of SWToR's history. Did someone from EA say this, or are we just assuming this? I don't think we can really know this unless we know how much they actually spent, and nobody really seems to know.
they sold at least 2 million boxes ( 1 million in 3 days 1.7 mil subs at peak ) and maintained over 1 million subs for the first 5 months. The wiki lists the development costs between 150-250 million, people guessing higher are just guessing. Any other number without a factual source is just someone guessing.
At this point it's a pretty weak argument to say they haven't made that amount back. It probably isn't buying them all yachts, but it's making money.
Right, but I think people are trying to say they definitely paid for the game or not on just box sales. Aside from this not being relevant to how their payment structure is setup, we can't really know if their initial revenue exceeded their initial expenses without knowing their actual initial expenses. We also don't really know their initial revenue since we don't know how much they made off of each box or digital sale. It's just one of those things that doesn't have a definitive answer, and it doesn't matter that much anyway since even if they made all the money back on day one, they wouldn't have paid the game off, they would have simply made whatever payments were necessary at the time and put the extra money into other projects or further development of SWToR.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
EA get 100% of the sale? Really. No sales taxes to pay.
This pretty much sums it up right here. Yeah if you don't understand what is wrong with what you said right there then you clearly are the most uninformed person here.
If you know what is wrong with it then you clearly lied.
Yes they made back their entire production budget back from the intial sales. It's amazing that someone is still trying to claim otherwise. But there you go not much sense in the "hater" group.
In the EU it is called Value Added Tax and is paid on games; typical rate is about 20%. In the Us it varies depending on state / city / how you buy the game (lived and worked in both parts of the world.) Pretty feeble attempt to deflect from your stupid "lie" that EA get 100% of online sales though.
EA get 100% of the sale? Really. No sales taxes to pay.
This pretty much sums it up right here. Yeah if you don't understand what is wrong with what you said right there then you clearly are the most uninformed person here.
If you know what is wrong with it then you clearly lied.
Yes they made back their entire production budget back from the intial sales. It's amazing that someone is still trying to claim otherwise. But there you go not much sense in the "hater" group.
In the EU it is called Value Added Tax and is paid on games; typical rate is about 20%. In the Us it varies depending on state / city / how you buy the game (lived and worked in both parts of the world.) Pretty feeble attempt to deflect from your stupid "lie" that EA get 100% of online sales though.
facepalm... so you are willfully ignorant
VAT and sales tax are applied BEFORE the purchase. Sales tax is also not appled in the US to online sales in most states.
So saying that VAT and Sales tax takes money away from EA is WRONG
You are clearly not qualifed for this disscuion
Also they mentioned the budget being covered by the initial sales at GDC. So yeah its a fact
they sold at least 2 million boxes ( 1 million in 3 days 1.7 mil subs at peak ) and maintained over 1 million subs for the first 5 months. The wiki lists the development costs between 150-250 million, people guessing higher are just guessing. Any other number without a factual source is just someone guessing.
At this point it's a pretty weak argument to say they haven't made that amount back. It probably isn't buying them all yachts, but it's making money.
The 1M subs for over 5 months is based on the 1.7M number they announced in Feb 2012 and the 1.3M number in May 2012.
However in March the CEO clarified that of the 1.7M only about half were actual subscribers. And the 1.3M number was inflated by the free 30 day extension EA gave to everyone who was a subscriber on April XX (12th?). With the free weekends and the free week they also gave out pretty much anyone who bought the game and took out a 3 month package was still counted in the 1.3M number.
EA probably didn't get 10 full months subs out of anyone - included 30 days, free 30 days, free week, weekends etc. Allowing for operating costs. the development team that was still in place, taxes (paid in the EU on subs) etc. - well the numbers are not hard to do.
Has it made back its cost today. Difficult question to answer actually. for example how do you cost the first 12 months or so of SWTORs development cost EA? One answer: add the "wages" people were paid by Bioware to the "wages" people were paid by EA Bioware. Another answer: add the wages EA paid to a % of what EA corporate paid for Bioware. A third answer, and one that analysts gave out to EA shareholders: wages EA paid, plus % of what EA corporate paid + % of the stock options that EA granted.
I doubt it has but the question is moot because the cost will have been written off, or sunk to use US terminology. Last year the game was holding its own and covering its costs. I shy away from terms like making a profit - complicated subject! This year is probably crucial. No big PR pushes announced; game is older; more new games etc.
It will be interesting to see what EA say - if anything - in their prepared comments in February / May etc.
Last year the game was holding its own and covering its costs. I shy away from terms like making a profit - complicated subject! This year is probably crucial. No big PR pushes announced; game is older; more new games etc.
It will be interesting to see what EA say - if anything - in their prepared comments in February / May etc.
If they averaged just under half a million subs for 2013, in addition to the 139 million they made from their cash shop, it is probably substantially more likely than not that they turned a profit for the year.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me.
Last year the game was holding its own and covering its costs. I shy away from terms like making a profit - complicated subject! This year is probably crucial. No big PR pushes announced; game is older; more new games etc.
It will be interesting to see what EA say - if anything - in their prepared comments in February / May etc.
If they averaged just under half a million subs for 2013, in addition to the 139 million they made from their cash shop, it is probably substantially more likely than not that they turned a profit for the year.
They were pretty up front about how many people they needed to be profitable at 300k players. Doesn't seem likely that they aren't making a profit with something like a half million players plus some large number of cash shop transactions.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
they sold at least 2 million boxes ( 1 million in 3 days 1.7 mil subs at peak ) and maintained over 1 million subs for the first 5 months. The wiki lists the development costs between 150-250 million, people guessing higher are just guessing. Any other number without a factual source is just someone guessing.
At this point it's a pretty weak argument to say they haven't made that amount back. It probably isn't buying them all yachts, but it's making money.
The 1M subs for over 5 months is based on the 1.7M number they announced in Feb 2012 and the 1.3M number in May 2012.
However in March the CEO clarified that of the 1.7M only about half were actual subscribers. And the 1.3M number was inflated by the free 30 day extension EA gave to everyone who was a subscriber on April XX (12th?). With the free weekends and the free week they also gave out pretty much anyone who bought the game and took out a 3 month package was still counted in the 1.3M number.
EA probably didn't get 10 full months subs out of anyone - included 30 days, free 30 days, free week, weekends etc. Allowing for operating costs. the development team that was still in place, taxes (paid in the EU on subs) etc. - well the numbers are not hard to do.
Has it made back its cost today. Difficult question to answer actually. for example how do you cost the first 12 months or so of SWTORs development cost EA? One answer: add the "wages" people were paid by Bioware to the "wages" people were paid by EA Bioware. Another answer: add the wages EA paid to a % of what EA corporate paid for Bioware. A third answer, and one that analysts gave out to EA shareholders: wages EA paid, plus % of what EA corporate paid + % of the stock options that EA granted.
I doubt it has but the question is moot because the cost will have been written off, or sunk to use US terminology. Last year the game was holding its own and covering its costs. I shy away from terms like making a profit - complicated subject! This year is probably crucial. No big PR pushes announced; game is older; more new games etc.
It will be interesting to see what EA say - if anything - in their prepared comments in February / May etc.
lots of probablies, maybes, hard to says, lots of complicated subjects, lots of information that you are just grabbing numbers out of thin air, no facts, no links, just lots of guessing with no actual knowledge of what your actually talking about. Well that's what I got out of that anyways.
of course he isn't going to post any links or use any facts. If he did he would prove himself wrong.
Heck he doesn't even understand how taxes work, why would he even have the slightest clue about the video game industry.
they sold at least 2 million boxes ( 1 million in 3 days 1.7 mil subs at peak ) and maintained over 1 million subs for the first 5 months. The wiki lists the development costs between 150-250 million, people guessing higher are just guessing. Any other number without a factual source is just someone guessing.
At this point it's a pretty weak argument to say they haven't made that amount back. It probably isn't buying them all yachts, but it's making money.
Right, but I think people are trying to say they definitely paid for the game or not on just box sales. Aside from this not being relevant to how their payment structure is setup, we can't really know if their initial revenue exceeded their initial expenses without knowing their actual initial expenses. We also don't really know their initial revenue since we don't know how much they made off of each box or digital sale. It's just one of those things that doesn't have a definitive answer, and it doesn't matter that much anyway since even if they made all the money back on day one, they wouldn't have paid the game off, they would have simply made whatever payments were necessary at the time and put the extra money into other projects or further development of SWToR.
You don't actually need to know any numbers to really know the answer ( and I agree it's not important anyway )
SWTOR is 2 years old. EA has a long history of how they treat mmos that are not making money. This game isn't getting that treatment, so they obviously feel it's worth putting money into it. If a game was 2 years old, and still in the red EA would have giving it the warhammer treatment and written it off.
They don't screw around trying to eek pennies out of a game so they don't have to admit it failed. It makes money or it dies a quick death and they move on.
they sold at least 2 million boxes ( 1 million in 3 days 1.7 mil subs at peak ) and maintained over 1 million subs for the first 5 months. The wiki lists the development costs between 150-250 million, people guessing higher are just guessing. Any other number without a factual source is just someone guessing.
At this point it's a pretty weak argument to say they haven't made that amount back. It probably isn't buying them all yachts, but it's making money.
Right, but I think people are trying to say they definitely paid for the game or not on just box sales. Aside from this not being relevant to how their payment structure is setup, we can't really know if their initial revenue exceeded their initial expenses without knowing their actual initial expenses. We also don't really know their initial revenue since we don't know how much they made off of each box or digital sale. It's just one of those things that doesn't have a definitive answer, and it doesn't matter that much anyway since even if they made all the money back on day one, they wouldn't have paid the game off, they would have simply made whatever payments were necessary at the time and put the extra money into other projects or further development of SWToR.
You don't actually need to know any numbers to really know the answer ( and I agree it's not important anyway )
SWTOR is 2 years old. EA has a long history of how they treat mmos that are not making money. This game isn't getting that treatment, so they obviously feel it's worth putting money into it. If a game was 2 years old, and still in the red EA would have giving it the warhammer treatment and written it off.
They don't screw around trying to eek pennies out of a game so they don't have to admit it failed. It makes money or it dies a quick death and they move on.
Yeah, this is probably most true. They'll run it until it can't cover their fixed expenses or until something better comes along.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
We know from start that the initail costs of the game ie the budget was covered by the boxed sales of the game. We also know that SWtOR has always maintaned a profit even back when they were firing people it has always stayed in teh black.
Thats why they did the firings so they could stay profitable.
Absolutely delusional posts like this are just mind boggling.
It is one thing to be a fanboy of something and latch on to inflated sales/sub numbers, lowball cost estimates of the creating a game, etc.
But when you are so far off the deep end that you are claiming things that don't even make sense...
Game companies are putting out two million plus selling games many times a year. Do you really think these company's are making 200-250 million off the sales of these games???
Really???
This is like the delusional, and rapidly dwindling, Xbox fans who get their 'sales numbers' from vgchartz - a site run by a little kid Xbox fan who was permabanned from the neogaf forums for making up hilariously fake and inflated Xbox/Xbox game sales numbers. He then stormed off and created vgchartz so he could spread his fake sales numbers without interference. His fake sales numbers are so absurd that he regularly makes up numbers that claim Xbox sales that don't even make sense since they are greater than the already massively inflated Microsoft numbers.
Doesn't matter, as long as fanboys have something to latch on to. "I believe these numbers because I want them to be true"
The roughly 60 million number off 2.4 million box/digital download sales is right in line with what most game companies make off similar sales numbers.
That 60 million number is REVENUE. Not profit.
Not even close to the 200-250 million wasted by EA on the SWTOR fiasco. And off course no where near 600-800 million EA wasted on Bioware.
Now take that 60 million and start subtracting off EA's costs that don't just magically stop the day the game goes GM and is sent off to retailers.
The EA/Bioware SWTOR team peaked at over 600 employees. Bottom rung,deadweight staff like associate producers are making about 60-70k a year, senior software engineers are in the 100-130k range, VPs are making even more. The actual cost to a company is roughly 1.5 times an employee's salary when you add in health insurance, benefits, and other overhead just to manage them.
That means that EA is burning through:
600 employees * 100k average salary * 1.5 = 90 million a year added costs to EA at the time SWTOR shipped
Cut the team size in half through layoffs and EA is still burning though 45 million a year just on the SWTOR team alone. Or even cut it in half again to 150 and EA is blowing through 22.5 million a year just for the SWTOR team.
That's just salary alone, now start adding in all the other ongoing operating costs, additional marketing, etc. and it should be perfectly clear why EA doesn't want to talk about SWTOR .
EA will never make back the money they wasted on the SWTOR fiasco. Ever.
Nor the money they blew buying that turd of a developer Bioware.
We know from start that the initail costs of the game ie the budget was covered by the boxed sales of the game. We also know that SWtOR has always maintaned a profit even back when they were firing people it has always stayed in teh black.
Thats why they did the firings so they could stay profitable.
Absolutely delusional posts like this are just mind boggling.
Doesn't matter, as long as fanboys have something to latch on to. "I believe these numbers because I want them to be true"
To sum up your entire argument in one line
"I don't believe these numbers because I don't want them to be true."
btw...it's hard to be a fan boy when you think the game sucks. This isn't about being in love with the game. It's about a subject of interest and discussing it with other. Most of the people you're calling fanboys couldn't give two shits about the actual game.
Comments
Exactly. Which shows that the number is a guess as they also said that it is predominantly a sub based game. i.e. they are making more money from subs. So if the data is 100% accurate SWTOR must have more than 772k subs.
(I am actually amazed that they have all these people supplying them with their spending habits tbh.)
As o how many subscribers SWTOR has I reckon less but EA have said very little. However:
1. Ohlsen did say that subs were going up after the f2p option - dangerous to use such comments but assuming that was the case then pre-f2p launch the game had less than 500k. Since in May EA announced just under 500k. Inflated by the Makeb discount no doubt.
2. And in August the CFO said had lost 25% of their pre-F2P number - so max number would be 75% of 500k or 375k. That assumes the game had 500k at the launch of the f2p option though so leaves no room for the subs are going up comment.
The other comments of course are when Ohlsen announced 2M new accounts last April and then last May we found the game had 1.7M + 500k. Which suggests that the game was down to 200k pre-f2p. And 75% of 200k would be 150k.
Back to the $139M. Their assessment says SWTOR is predominantly a subscriber based game. But if so it has more subs by a long way than EA have said. Bottomline its a guess based on a sample and some assumption. But please sign up to their service at a very reasonable cost!!!!!
i am not playing this right now but its been obvious since F2P and the server merges went live that this game has been successful.
tons of people play and there are tons of cartel items that are in the game which people bought.
just another reason why you should never listen to people here, the vast majority of opinions here are biased.
and they say "fanboi's" are a cancer to gaming? if that is so, then what does that make "haters" that spread false information because they are still pissed it isn't the game they wanted? the black plague of gaming?
it isn't just swtor either, i see this crap all over these forums.
Very true. Fans of WOW have been dealing with these type of people for years. The game wasn't my cup of tea but I never spent my free time crying on their forums about why the game sucks..That's just rude and disrespectful to the people who are there to actually discuss current events with the game.Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
No.
Old ground so keep things short.
- EA do not get 100% of the cost of physical sales. Retailers, tax, distribution costs etc. etc.
- Analysts, the ones who go to the EA conference calls, estimated that EA would make $60m on 2M sales.
- Funcom, in a financial presentation post AoC, said that they made between 20-24% of the box price (varied by country). So something over $10 a box maybe.
- EA got a bigger % because a) they distributed the game - so got two bites at the cherry and b) there was a mix of physical and online sales via Origin
- Box price in Europe was sub-$50 on Amazon etc, of which c. 20% was tax, and the price went down post Christmas.
Hard to argue with the $60M figure though; maybe it was $55M maybe $65M but about right.
Yes EA eventually announced 2.4M through sales and they will have sold extra boxes to retailers that were probably never sold but unless you believe SWTOR cost less than $100M it is pretty clear that box sales did not cover the cost of the game.
And lets not go down the how much the game cost debate. Somewhere in there is the cost of buying Bioware. Factor that in and the cost of SWTORs goes way up.
Goes up? Sure. As much as you are implying? No, they were also buying the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series, and Mass Effect 3 wasn't exactly a flop.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
It's amazing how wrong you often are. The biggest part of the 2.4 million wasn't boxed sales but digital copies. Digital copies EA gets 100% of the sale.
It was stated actually at GDC that the cost of the game was completely covered by the intial sales of the game and that EA made sure it always turned a profit hence the firing of employees when the subscrptions dropped.
It is amazing at how much you hate this game that you will go to great lengths to lie.
digital copies= no tax, no wages, no Development costs?
if i was a dev, i would sell digital ONLY
PS if swtor was doing so well from start, they shouldnt have fired most of the staff
and, they shouldnt have scrubbed the storylines either
yea, thats mucho dinero
wow still made more with their CC ,around 220 mio
PS 2 made roughly the same as swtors CC, so they had to change their business plans too
tombraider 2013 cost 100 mio to make, and that wasnt a Financial success, because it didnt
recover those 100 mios in the first month
DRIVEL!
EA get 100% of the sale? Really. No sales taxes to pay. No salaries. No website costs. No building to pay for. No electricity. No telecoms. No marketing costs. Do I need to carry on to demonstrate how uninformed you are.
As far as the percentage of online to retail sales there was an analyst question post launch - paraphrase: was it 50/50, EA answer: done a little better. One could almost believe that the analysts who attend EA's conference calls had allowed for Origin. Taken that into account when they estimated $60M from 2M sales.
Obviously however the analysts did not have the wisdom of GDC. They were not indoctrinated. Shame on them for lying.
Indeed how could EA manage to make a loss given what was said at GDC. Given your drivel about keeping 100$ of sales comment however there is no point discussing corporate profit and costs.
In fact as you believe 100% of sales goes to EA better if you don't talk about costs or profit at all in the future.
"It is amazing at how much you love this game that you will go to great lengths to lie."
See what I did there. I don't hate the game but you seem smitten with glamour. And don't understand. Keep 100% of sales indeed.
The cost debate I was thinking of was "Bioware having the SWTOR IP and the potential to make WoW-esque money" was a big pat of the purchase price.
At the time I took a simpler view. The headline purchase cost was $860M but I considered the stock options to be paid for by EA shareholders rather than EA corporate. Lower figure: c. $640M. (from SEC filings).
Then I simply amortized the $640M across the number of games published giving a figure of c. $60M per game. At the time it was 10 or 11 games published depending on whether Mass Effect was a Bioware or an EA Bioware game.
What is really sad is that Bioware have only published one new title of late: Mass Effect 3.
Call it 12 titles (counting Mass Effect, excluding Hutt) and you come up with each game having to absorb $53M of costs.
(If you count Hutt Cartel you can get the number down to c. $50M but that means that you are saying that Hutt Cartel cost $50M over and above whatever it cost internally to make).
There will have been hundreds of pages justifying the cost of the takeover; each game in the pipeline will have had a potential to make money. And yes there will have been some bricks and mortar stuff. That is the debate. Did SWTOR merit a bigger share of the cost than other games? did it have a bigger potential? Probably but whatever the values at the end of the day the "$640M" has to be recovered through the products that are sold: in this case a small handful of games.
This pretty much sums it up right here. Yeah if you don't understand what is wrong with what you said right there then you clearly are the most uninformed person here.
If you know what is wrong with it then you clearly lied.
Yes they made back their entire production budget back from the intial sales. It's amazing that someone is still trying to claim otherwise. But there you go not much sense in the "hater" group.
I'm not familiar with this part of SWToR's history. Did someone from EA say this, or are we just assuming this? I don't think we can really know this unless we know how much they actually spent, and nobody really seems to know.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
they sold at least 2 million boxes ( 1 million in 3 days 1.7 mil subs at peak ) and maintained over 1 million subs for the first 5 months. The wiki lists the development costs between 150-250 million, people guessing higher are just guessing. Any other number without a factual source is just someone guessing.
At this point it's a pretty weak argument to say they haven't made that amount back. It probably isn't buying them all yachts, but it's making money.
Right, but I think people are trying to say they definitely paid for the game or not on just box sales. Aside from this not being relevant to how their payment structure is setup, we can't really know if their initial revenue exceeded their initial expenses without knowing their actual initial expenses. We also don't really know their initial revenue since we don't know how much they made off of each box or digital sale. It's just one of those things that doesn't have a definitive answer, and it doesn't matter that much anyway since even if they made all the money back on day one, they wouldn't have paid the game off, they would have simply made whatever payments were necessary at the time and put the extra money into other projects or further development of SWToR.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
In the EU it is called Value Added Tax and is paid on games; typical rate is about 20%. In the Us it varies depending on state / city / how you buy the game (lived and worked in both parts of the world.) Pretty feeble attempt to deflect from your stupid "lie" that EA get 100% of online sales though.
facepalm... so you are willfully ignorant
VAT and sales tax are applied BEFORE the purchase. Sales tax is also not appled in the US to online sales in most states.
So saying that VAT and Sales tax takes money away from EA is WRONG
You are clearly not qualifed for this disscuion
Also they mentioned the budget being covered by the initial sales at GDC. So yeah its a fact
The 1M subs for over 5 months is based on the 1.7M number they announced in Feb 2012 and the 1.3M number in May 2012.
However in March the CEO clarified that of the 1.7M only about half were actual subscribers. And the 1.3M number was inflated by the free 30 day extension EA gave to everyone who was a subscriber on April XX (12th?). With the free weekends and the free week they also gave out pretty much anyone who bought the game and took out a 3 month package was still counted in the 1.3M number.
EA probably didn't get 10 full months subs out of anyone - included 30 days, free 30 days, free week, weekends etc. Allowing for operating costs. the development team that was still in place, taxes (paid in the EU on subs) etc. - well the numbers are not hard to do.
Has it made back its cost today. Difficult question to answer actually. for example how do you cost the first 12 months or so of SWTORs development cost EA? One answer: add the "wages" people were paid by Bioware to the "wages" people were paid by EA Bioware. Another answer: add the wages EA paid to a % of what EA corporate paid for Bioware. A third answer, and one that analysts gave out to EA shareholders: wages EA paid, plus % of what EA corporate paid + % of the stock options that EA granted.
I doubt it has but the question is moot because the cost will have been written off, or sunk to use US terminology. Last year the game was holding its own and covering its costs. I shy away from terms like making a profit - complicated subject! This year is probably crucial. No big PR pushes announced; game is older; more new games etc.
It will be interesting to see what EA say - if anything - in their prepared comments in February / May etc.
If they averaged just under half a million subs for 2013, in addition to the 139 million they made from their cash shop, it is probably substantially more likely than not that they turned a profit for the year.
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.
They were pretty up front about how many people they needed to be profitable at 300k players. Doesn't seem likely that they aren't making a profit with something like a half million players plus some large number of cash shop transactions.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
of course he isn't going to post any links or use any facts. If he did he would prove himself wrong.
Heck he doesn't even understand how taxes work, why would he even have the slightest clue about the video game industry.
You don't actually need to know any numbers to really know the answer ( and I agree it's not important anyway )
SWTOR is 2 years old. EA has a long history of how they treat mmos that are not making money. This game isn't getting that treatment, so they obviously feel it's worth putting money into it. If a game was 2 years old, and still in the red EA would have giving it the warhammer treatment and written it off.
They don't screw around trying to eek pennies out of a game so they don't have to admit it failed. It makes money or it dies a quick death and they move on.
Yeah, this is probably most true. They'll run it until it can't cover their fixed expenses or until something better comes along.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Absolutely delusional posts like this are just mind boggling.
It is one thing to be a fanboy of something and latch on to inflated sales/sub numbers, lowball cost estimates of the creating a game, etc.
But when you are so far off the deep end that you are claiming things that don't even make sense...
Game companies are putting out two million plus selling games many times a year. Do you really think these company's are making 200-250 million off the sales of these games???
Really???
This is like the delusional, and rapidly dwindling, Xbox fans who get their 'sales numbers' from vgchartz - a site run by a little kid Xbox fan who was permabanned from the neogaf forums for making up hilariously fake and inflated Xbox/Xbox game sales numbers. He then stormed off and created vgchartz so he could spread his fake sales numbers without interference. His fake sales numbers are so absurd that he regularly makes up numbers that claim Xbox sales that don't even make sense since they are greater than the already massively inflated Microsoft numbers.
Doesn't matter, as long as fanboys have something to latch on to. "I believe these numbers because I want them to be true"
The roughly 60 million number off 2.4 million box/digital download sales is right in line with what most game companies make off similar sales numbers.
That 60 million number is REVENUE. Not profit.
Not even close to the 200-250 million wasted by EA on the SWTOR fiasco. And off course no where near 600-800 million EA wasted on Bioware.
Now take that 60 million and start subtracting off EA's costs that don't just magically stop the day the game goes GM and is sent off to retailers.
The EA/Bioware SWTOR team peaked at over 600 employees. Bottom rung,deadweight staff like associate producers are making about 60-70k a year, senior software engineers are in the 100-130k range, VPs are making even more. The actual cost to a company is roughly 1.5 times an employee's salary when you add in health insurance, benefits, and other overhead just to manage them.
That means that EA is burning through:
600 employees * 100k average salary * 1.5 = 90 million a year added costs to EA at the time SWTOR shipped
Cut the team size in half through layoffs and EA is still burning though 45 million a year just on the SWTOR team alone. Or even cut it in half again to 150 and EA is blowing through 22.5 million a year just for the SWTOR team.
That's just salary alone, now start adding in all the other ongoing operating costs, additional marketing, etc. and it should be perfectly clear why EA doesn't want to talk about SWTOR .
EA will never make back the money they wasted on the SWTOR fiasco. Ever.
Nor the money they blew buying that turd of a developer Bioware.
To sum up your entire argument in one line
"I don't believe these numbers because I don't want them to be true."
btw...it's hard to be a fan boy when you think the game sucks. This isn't about being in love with the game. It's about a subject of interest and discussing it with other. Most of the people you're calling fanboys couldn't give two shits about the actual game.