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Numbers may lie, but percentages don't...
Opinionated1
Member Posts: 22
I posted this on the official boards, in Chris Cao's infamous thread, which is now locked. I just wanted to see what you guys here think of it:
Something just occurrd to me. Assuming the numbers are correct based on Chris Cao's statement that their own internal metrics indicate that only 20% of those who play Star Wars Galaxies use the forums, and assuming that the counting of active user names on the forums really does point to roughly 2500 people, and assuming that the total number of actual paying customers really IS approximately 12,500, that means that SWG is generating a monthly revenue of roughly $187,500.00 per month, down from the $4,500,000.00+ per month when they had 300,000+ subscribers. This demonstrates roughly a 95.83% drop in profits per month. If these figures are even remotely close to accurate based on what Chris has said, then anually, SOE has lost roughly $51,750,000.00 in anual revenue for Star Wars Galaxies.
I don't know of very many corporate entities (or their partners and investors) who would tolerate such a massive loss. So I believe that all the redesigns which tick players off, the marginalization of customer concerns, and blatantly inflamatory statements like those of Chris Cao, coupled with the constant broken promises (which could be interpreted as lies) on the part of SOE all taken together point to one adgenda on SOE's part:
They know that the situation is broken beyond fixing. They are looking to drive people away, make them go ahead and unsubscribe so that they actually start going into the red. They're still in the black, but nowhere near what they want or their partners/investors expect in returns. The sooner they stop making a profit, then they can justifyably pull the plug and SWG's failure becomes a nice tax write-off for them. We know it's all about money for the corporates.
I say, that even though it will mean putting up with BS, DON'T cancel your subscription. Make them ride this disaster out until they either put forth a genuine effort to turn it around, or unjustifyably pull the plug. They clearly want out as much as we want our game. Well, deny us our game, so I think we should deny them their easy-way-out.
In Christ,
G. B. Jackson
G. B. Jackson
Comments
"The man who exchanges Liberty for Iconic classes is a fool deserving of neither." - Me and Ben Franklin
Have to disagree here. If done right SWG could have hit the numbers of WoW or least came close. Star Wars is known the world over by everyone. There are probably undiscovered tribes in the amazon that know who Luke Skywalker is. Of course the common arguement is that not all Star Wars fans play games and not all Star Wars games fans play MMOs. But as WoW has shown..... Alot of nongamers and nonMMOgamers have jumped into WoW.
At C3 last year, the inside joke was SWG players. All these hardcore fans laughed at them. But they also would admit they would have been playing SWG if it had stuck closer to continuity and hadnt always been a bug filled mess.
Kai
Hauken Stormchaser
I want pre-CU back
Station.com : We got your game
Yeah?, Well i want it back!!!
that is the truth right there, even if they are not in the red this game is a failure, soe claimed the game was a failure before CU with 400k players, and it was a failure with 300k-250k before the nge and it's still a failure with a 100k or less now. It may not be in the red but it's far far from a success. My only question is why is L.A. sticking with this failure, i would kill it and move on try to forget like force commander lol. but hey L.A. aren't as smart as they use to be they all but canceled kotor 3 with delays. but hey i don't know crap.
Also i think L.A. killed the game just as much as SOE, they were the ones that said i want an expanison when esp 3 comes out and i want it to be wookie homeworld. i want an expansion went esp 3 comes to dvd and i want it to be lava land. There were some many great ideas for expansion on the forums "hoth, Nal hutta, Nar shaddaa" and others but why listen to the fans. I don't think i heard a single person say i want lava land. that was all L.A. Both have fallen far with swg and i don't think either will recover totally from it. There lack of sunseting it causes me real worry, Both companies know it's a failure both companies know they aren't going to get millions of players, both companies know they won't make up the players lost, so why keep this dead fish in the take any longer.
Proud Master CH -
Sorry,
Proud FORMER Master CH...
my toon was untimely converted into something more Star Warsy
I have been saying ever since the POS new Game Experiment hit and then watching the number of players dwindle that the LACK of people participating in the SWG forums was a DIRECT reflexion of how many people are actually playing the game.
I posted this back in Jan '06 and my post was deleted. Anyone that has half a brain would have to agree that there is a direct relation (percentage) wise between forums and game.
20% sounds close enough for me, but could be a little lower ... 15%. I also don't go by the number of posts but by the number of "Views". There are people that view and not post. However this number will be inflated because you don't have to be logged on to add to the view count when reading the forums.
Have to disagree here. If done right SWG could have hit the numbers of WoW or least came close. Star Wars is known the world over by everyone. There are probably undiscovered tribes in the amazon that know who Luke Skywalker is. Of course the common arguement is that not all Star Wars fans play games and not all Star Wars games fans play MMOs. But as WoW has shown..... Alot of nongamers and nonMMOgamers have jumped into WoW.
At C3 last year, the inside joke was SWG players. All these hardcore fans laughed at them. But they also would admit they would have been playing SWG if it had stuck closer to continuity and hadnt always been a bug filled mess.
Kai
I agree that SWG could have reached the same numbers of WoW.
But this is what WoW had going for them when the current version WoW was released:
You put this history together and you have a success story for WoW. $OE and $LA was too freaking stupid to realize this. They thought they could just "copy" WoW and Diablo with some EQ put it on a new PS3 that has now been delayed and come up with something that could compete with WoW. This was a formula for failure and failure is what the result was.
Investors and Senior management at Sony either don't give a shit about lost revenue or they are just as incompetent as the people at $OE and $LA. If I saw that one of my products was losing 60 - 100 million a year between subs and expansion sales ... heads would be rolling and I would make sure they find a new line of work.
The mistake made is to even call SWG a competitor to WoW. They are not the same genre, the only thing that they have in common is they are both MMORPG's. To say that Sci-Fi MMO's like SWG or EVE compete with WOW is to say that Microsoft Word competes with Madden `07. I do think that WoW wiped out fantasy competitors (such as EQ/EQ2/Lineage) but that SWG wiped itself out with the twin cataclysms known as CUNGE.
The market for Sci-Fi based MMOs is not the size that the market for a fantasy based one is. SWG was (and sadly still is) the most played Sci-Fi MMO ever. Sometime soon (if not already) EVE will surpass SWG and become the current #1.
Star Wars and Star Trek geeks (which we all are, admit it) don't like hack and slash, which is basically what fantasy MMOs consist of. We want geekish sophistication and complexity. Pre-CU SWG came the closest to any MMO past, present, or planned in the future, to satisfying that want.
STO is going to flop miserably if it tries to be hack and slash, kill loot rinse repeat. Indeed, I think that the developers of STO realize this and are learning from the mistakes made with NGE. I noted sometime back on their website they already said they were changing their combat system to being traditional MMO turn based, after originally planning to be FPS like (similar to NGE). They also seem to be moving towards a skills based class system as well.
The Sci-fi crowd more than anyone demands a game based on their favorite IP, such as Star Wars or Star Trek to be a virtual world in which we can finally fulfill our fantasy of being the Captain of the Enterprise, or in becoming a Jedi Knight. SWG once had that, now it doesn't. Click, Jedi, woot. No journey, no struggle, no effort, no fun, no subscription...
The only thing that someone was trying to compare was size of the playerbase.
By your stement above, IF SWG was done right then SWG should have blown the doors off of WoW. Why?
Because StarWars has a HUGE HUGE following to tap into. I bet there are tens of millions of people in the US alone that are Star Wars fanatics. If marketing was done right (in essence there wasn't any) and $OE and $LA tapped into the 100s of millions of Star Wars fanatics all over the world they could have easily had a larger playerbase than WoW.
BTW, STO is going to fail because $OE is in bed with Perpetual. It doen't matter at what level because we all know $OE will eventually get their grubby hands on it and destroy it.
By your stement above, IF SWG was done right then SWG should have blown the doors off of WoW. Why?
Because StarWars has a HUGE HUGE following to tap into. I be there are tens of millions of people in the US alone that are Star Wars fanatics. If marketing was done right (in essence there wasn't any) and $OE and $LA tapped into the 100s of millions of Star Wars fanatics all over the world they could have easily had a larger playerbase than WoW.
This is true, but part of the fault was that they released the game about a year before it should have been.
Had they released SWG at Publish 11-12 (including everything they had added to that point plus JTL) and then actually marketed it, it would have done a lot better. SWG had a terrible reputation for bugs and stuff being missing, even during the pre-CU.
Of course now it has the reputation of having lots of bugs and missing stuff, and on top of that the reputation for screwing players over without remorse and being unfun...
They never should have released a STAR Wars MMO without space combat. Every publish and expansion after that base game was released should have included space and ground content in equal measure. Star Wars centers around SPACE battles, hence the name STAR Wars. Too bad the Devs even to this day don't see that, and haven't added one bit of space content in a year and a half.