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Bioware numbers spin, and is SWTOR *really* a success, a dissection.
Hrimnir
Member RarePosts: 2,415
Its not a matter of "making up the numbers", we're not saying they just grabbed a number and threw it on paper, we're saying they spin the numbers. Even at the time that was posted a healthy portion of the player base was still in their free month (or included gametime with purchase of game). The game REQUIRES you to sign up for a subcription with a credit card in order to play (if you dont use a gametime card). People were posting screenshots of their accounts that they CANCELLED prior to their 30 days that the status showed as "subscribed".
Their own conference call shows and confirms exactly what we're talking about. If they had 1.7 million "Active Subscribers" Do you honestly expect us to believe that only 1 million of those 1.7 million would be logging in at least once per day? Per their own thread they stated "1 million unique logins per day". So, 1.7 to 1mil is 42% decline in logins, which is probably (mostly) accounting for the people who have already cancelled but are still "subscribed" because their 30 days isnt up.
The other topic i need to bring up is: Is SWTOR *really* a success?
They're trying to claim this is the most successful launch of an MMO in history because of these numbers. Now, lets dissect this for a moment. Take Rift, Rift has sold well over a million boxes and as of august had over a million actual paying customers, not spun numbers, but people who bought the game, installed it, made an account, and subcribed. I'll provide links at the end of the article for evidence of this.
Now, lets dissect things for a moment. Trion secured 100 million dollars to make 3 games, Rift, End Of Nations, and at the time an unyet specified sci-fi MMO. 50 million of that was allocated to making Rift.
Trion was a brand new, unproven developer making an MMO based on a brand new IP (so NO fanbase whatsoever to count on). They programmed their own game engine from the ground up, which is time consuming and risky if it turns out to be a crappy engine (EQ2 and Vanguard at release are good examples of bad engines) correction: It has come to my attn Rift used a heavily modified version of Gamebryo. All of this and only now are they seeing a decline in subs and its directly correlated to the release of SWTOR. This is to be expected, lots of people knew from the start that Rift would be a stopgap until the "big name IP" mmo's that were on the horizon came out. What is funny is how many people are returning to rift from SWTOR after having exhausted all of its content in less than 2 months time.
Now, lets take SWTOR. First of all, it has the biggest IP in the existence of man. You literally can't find something with a larger fanbase than Star Wars. Secondarily, it has "Bioware". The Fabled "can do no wrong, shits bars of gold that smell of flowers" developer. Then, they have a 200 million dollar budget. Read that again. 200 million. This should be the biggest recipe for making money rain from the sky like it was a hurricane.
Now, according to this vgchartz at the time of this thread's original post:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/336886/page/1
SWTOR sold 1.68million copies of the game.
We're now aware as of about 5 days ago that the game has sold approx 2million copies (including digital copies). This is per biowares own financial reports.
So, SWTOR sells 1.68 million in its first week, and only sells about 320k more copies in the following 30 days? And, per their own statements they're only sitting at about a million unique logins per day? And this is for a newly released game where the vast majority of the people are very likely to login *at least* once per day.
How ANYONE can define this as a success is beyond me. This game should have sold 2-3 times that number and retained far better than 50% of its userbase, and, had it not been a hulking, buggy piece of crap, it might actually have done that. But instead it has an unresponsive buggy engine, a severe lack of content, and a develoment team that actually has the audacity to claim that there is nothing wrong with the game, and consistently spins and downplays the concerns of their PAYING CUSTOMERS.
Most MMO's are considered failures if they dont at least make up their development costs with box sales. At the rate SWTOR is going it will need to maintain its supposed 1 million subscribers at a 100% retention rate for close to a year before it will even break even. This is NOT the meaning of the word success.
links for the rift links:
Edit 1: Corrected that Rift uses heavily modified gamebryo engine.
Edit 2:
This post was made not to "cause the downfall" of swtor. I made this post because i feel that developers like Bioware, Infinity Ward, EA, etc are ruining the game industry, and SWTOR is the most blatant and current example of that. I made this post because i feel that gamers are allowing themselves to be screwed by these companies by not demanding more, by not demanding quality. The simple fact is the state many of these games have been released in, and the lack of true new content (not whitewashed rehashed BS like in mass effect and Call of Duty series) would not have been accepted by the gaming masses even as little as 6 to 7 years ago. The gaming industry has turned into the equivalent of the RIAA. Make records that follow a certain formula, sell well to a bunch of morons (examples: justin bieber, and whatever flavor of the year they come up with next) and maximize profits at all costs. To hell with artistic integrity, what is that. If slappin a pair of tits on it will increase sales by 3%, do it. I'm sick of this mentality permeating the development community.
"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
Comments
It would be nice if we had a Video Game Business subforum. I used to mod a forum where we made a Biz forum so that stuff like this wouldn't muddy up actual game discussion (ie strats, faqs, impressions, etc)
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
I don´t log in to whaever game I play every day. Maybe 2 days out of 3 unless I am sick or a new expansion just came out.
I actually do other stuff as well as gaming, 1 million out of 1,7 does not seem that strange to me.
Not that I play TOR or have any special feelings about it one way or another but the reasoning sounds odd to me.
I don´t think we can see if TOR is a success or not for months yet.
Rift actually used the gamebryo engine.
You people (haters/fanboys) can believe whatever you want but looking at my guild roster gives a pretty good indication of how things in this game are going subscriber wise.
90ish unqiue members of which only about 20ish are still active. Thats a HUGE drop in active memberships. Much more than I saw in Rift after 1 month.
I agree. My nephew, whom was crazy about SWTOR in beta & a week into launch, has now canceled his account as of 2 days ago. So, I asked if I could log into it for a minute to look around.
Sure enough, his guild of 143 unique members (he was invited on the 3rd day of launch) has had only 39 unique logins in the past week alone. Not to mention that, from someone looking in from the outside, the game FEELS dead. I went to the main hub for lvl 50s, and there were like 11 people running around. That's it
!
I'm not surprised the game is tanking on numbers so quickly.
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
Let's dissect this for a moment:
1 million unique logins per day just means that not everyone logs in everyday.
Rift uses the Gamebryo engine.
Bioware did not sell 1.68 copies in the first week. That figure includes several months of preordering.
The devs have never said there is nothing wrong with the game.
It's too early to say how successful SWTOR is/will be.
I have a problem with these two posts. As of yet, I have not seen anywhere's in the Guild screen that shows if a member is "unique" or not and I have looked, many times. Instead, it shows EVERY toon as a unique person. The problem is that in my Guild of over 250 "unique" members, I have four toons on that list. Also, even in the most dead of hours there is at least a dozen playing at any one time with 50 to 60 in the West Coast (USA west coast server) peak hours of 7 to 11 pm. Those numbers are staying steady now for the last month with a slight improvement in the last week.
To me it seems the first and second posters are mixing in a lot of false information with only enough fact to support the lies. I could be wrong and if I can somehow find that "unique" member list, I will come back and say so, but for now I have to conclude it does not exist.
"If half of what you tell me is a lie, how can I believe any of it?"
See, everyone has to remember, the biggest selling point of this game was its title: "Star Wars". Thats the only reason this game broke 1 million subs. You had every fat, achne ridden Star Wars Jedi/Sith wannabe from here to timbucktu, dressed in their jedi robes, holding their light saber toys in one sweaty hand and their mouse in the other, chomping at the bit to get on and live their dream of being Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader or Darth Maul.
However, when they got on, all they got was WoW with lightsabers. Awesoooooom.... NOT! Its just the same stale, level/gear grind, endless questing monotony you get in every other WoW clone out there. thats why you see such a decline in active players. Cause once you get past the title of the game, the actual gameplay is nothing new. Bascially, youre just paying for a different name, not a different game. And when the dream is shattered, and reality sets back in, they realize they are just guys in robes in a basement staring at a screen, and the dream of nailing princess Leiah is long gone. So, instead of going through all of the crap of leveing up a new character, they shut down their account and reactivate their WoW accounts, slinking back to Azeroth with their tails between their legs.... because they play Worgens.... a shame they will never outlive.
Think about it: Why go play a game with identical mechanics and have to work up another character, when you can just stay on the other identical game where you are already established? Hence why TOR is suffering the same fate as every other WoW clone.
My prediction.... TOR free to play in one year. Shut down a year later.
So I'm kinda sceptic on the accuracy of its numbers, not saying that they aren't maybe good in estimating, but at the same time, maybe their estimations fall outside a 10-20% deviation.
BW people did make a statement that the sales were over 2 million with the Origin sales included, which could mean 2.05 million or over 2.5 million, it's the kind of vague statement that could mean both.Also, 1 million unique logins, ehm, sorry OP, your math and reasoning is kinda flunky: are you seriously suggesting that everyone who is subbed plays and logs in daily? Reality check: that doesn't happen for any MMORPG, so be real please. I am subbed and I'm definitely not logging in and playing daily, I have a life next to MMO gaming. Maybe some don't, but that doesn't account for all MMO gamers that they definitely log in every day of the week to play whatever MMO it is they're playing.
I could make some other comments about the arguments in the OP, but at this point I got the general idea the OP was posing and his fuzzy logic used for it. Meh, got boring :-/
Maybe a group of gamers really think like that about games: 'heck, I can already play that shooter or RPG or RTS or MMO with this kinda mechanics, why would I want to play other games with sortlike mechanics of that genre? 1 is enough for me'.
However, there are also lots of MMO gamers who played a LotrO, a Rift, an Aion, an AoC, an EQ2 etc, all with sortlike mechanics as a WoW has, and you know what? They had a hell of a lot of fun in those games for months and sometimes even for years.Nice way of insulting SW fans btw, always interesting to see how some people resort to trashtalking fans of a game they despise, I've discovered it's a certain kind of people who scoop to such low tricks, but hey, whatever :-)
[mod edit]
Admittedly this was funny ;-).
I agree with you and you are correct, but my point is this game is brand new, its barely been out 1 month. Yeah, people who are playing MMO's they've been subbed to for several months certainly dont log in every day. Brand new MMOs, especially ones based on popular IP's on the other hand, i think its a safe assumption that the vast majority of the playerbase is going to be logging in daily if not multiple times daily.
I also agree that we wont know if TOR is really a success for months from now. That was kind of the point of my thread. The fanbois are running away, as is Bioware themselves, claiming this is "the most succesful mmo thats ever been released". i'd have to get the exact words but i remember reading that in biowares own paperwork.
Thank you for the correction, i did google that and yes, it is a heavily modified, but originally is the gamebryo engine.
"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
I get the spin you are trying to put on what we both brought up but the thing is that I'm not a moron and I'm one of the Co-leaders of the guild so I have a pretty damn good grasp on who is who (mains/alts) and how often they login.
I can check the roster right nwo for you if you really want and count it up thought if you want.
108 members
32 active in the last 14 days. 1/3 of which are alts.
Anyways I'll leave you to your spin job and how anyone who reports seeing these kind of numbers is ignorant and an obvious hater/troll or whatever.
1mil daily unique logins out of a 1.7mil player base sounds pretty reasonable. I don't know anyone in my peer group (employed adults) who makes time to play every day. After working all day none of us really want to come home and sit in front of a computer for another 3-4 hours. We'll play about twice per week; otherwise we're with our families or out having drinks.
And as for your "success" question - any game that sells 1.7 million boxes is a success. That's $102mil in revenue. If the developer can't turn a profit with those kinds of numbers then there is something wrong with their business model, not their game.
Finally, I feel really dirty defending a game I don't like, but really, come off it now. This is just sad.
So, I find it amusing that you occuse me of fuzzy logic when i actually back the reasoning behind my statements, which is more than can be said for most of the bioware defense force.
"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
I like the cut of your jib
As for the logins, sorry, but I'm willing to bet that not every MMO gamer has logged in every day for the past month, not even 90%. Sure, the hardcore gamers or people for whom MMO gaming is their main hobby or lifestyle choice, but among the non-hardcore gamers I don't think so. Heck, I haven't even played every day in the week in the holiday weeks (been out of house for friends, family, festivities) nor in January and I certainly don't consider myself a unique snowflake.
Oh, and I didn't say that you weren't using logic or reasoning, just that your reasoning was fuzzy for some of the reasons I mentioned above.Swtor can shut down tomorrow, and it's probably a success for the studio already since they already recover and money and made some.
But I'm sure in a few month swtor sub will drop alot. It happens to every game.
A. Speaking of numbers spin, the OP cited a source (VGChartz) which indicates ToR sold 2.11m boxes while RIFT sold 0.50m boxes.
B. I have no clue if VGChartz is at all reliable, but I assume that if "1 million sold" numbers have been released for RIFT that gives VGChartz a +/-100% accuracy.
C. Who the hell cares? Do you like RIFT? Then play it. Do you like ToR? Then play it.
D. See any other MMORPGs with 2 million players? Just WOW? Well gosh, I guess that means only WOW is a success in this market if that's the measure of success.
E. If you factor out players who have cancelled their subscription, and think that 100% of the remaining players play every single day, then you have no clue how players play games. 40% of your users playing every day sounds entirely realistic, having worked on games where we track that stuff.
F. With 2.11m box sales, and assuming 10% of box sales were Deluxe Edition and 0% were Collector's Edition, it works out to $131m (minus the profit margin of retailers). This is an extremely conservative value as CE is probably more like 1-2% of sales and the DE ratio is likely higher too (possibly much higher.)
A similarly conservative, highly-bleeding estimate of subscription income would start at 1m subs and bleed 30% of those subs each month meaning they start with $15m profit and it bleeds down to $3.6m four months later resulting in $41m total.
A less conservative, highly-bleeding estimate starting at 1.7m subs and bleeding 30%/month gives them $70.6m after five months, allowing them to break even against dev costs (this ignores the cost of running the live team, but in the long run I can easily see it paying for itself.)
And of course it comes out dramatically more favorable if they bleed slower than that (and my model doesn't include the additional box sales and subscribers made during those five months.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Great job OP I am in 100% agreement with you.
Honestly I do not care if the game is a success or a failure.
I am just sick of all the lies and the corruption that has prevaded this industry.
It's bad enough when we are overrun by dishonest game developers. However, when the media insiders, the gaming sites that are suppose to be looking out for the gamers, providing us with honest accurate reviews and information, are instead just posting whatever lie of the week they are paid to post by the game developers, there is a real problem.
I understand gamesites have to kiss developer ass to get nice perks like press passes, and beta keys, but it has gone beyond that to letting game developers literally dictate reviews, and moderators moderating off-site forums in favor of dishonest developers.
This is a practice that gaming sites need to realize is not to thier benefit, and definately not to the benefit of thier members.
I'm not trying to pass any judgement here or tell you what to do but exactly why do you even bother subscribing to an MMO?
Why not save that $14.99 a month and spend it Margaritas with umbrellas in them at your family night out at Applebees?
I call bull on this as well. The only way you could do as you are claiming is if ONLY you are accepting new members AND you keep a list of who has every alt toon. Also, we have to keep in mind that not every person has every toon in the same Guild. I don't even keep every toon on the Republic side in the same Guild for example, so by your fuzzy tracking system, I would not be an active player, even though I am playing for many hours most days, not all, but about 5 out of 7.
The simple fact of this game is that it encourages having alt characters by virtue of having 8 unique story lines. Not all people will take advantage of this, but we did have a Guild discussion about this not too long ago while over 50 members were on and amazingly enough, the average number of alt toons was 3 on the Republic side alone and everyone had at least one Alt in another Guild, even the Guild Leader himself.
By the way, your reasoning just got REALLY fuzzy here. Just thought you might want to know. Especially on the "Guild Roster" numbers since you have no way of proving it. Heck, you can't even begin to try with the Guild Tools currently in the game.
Lastly, I have not "spun" anything, only called bull on the smokescreen you and others are throwing up. Two million in sales with only a drop of 15% is about half of what most games show after the free month. I think that is pretty good, but to be honest, I want to see where the game is in June and July to get a REAL idea of just how successful it is, not draw conclusions from numbers at the "less than two month" mark.
"If half of what you tell me is a lie, how can I believe any of it?"
a logical post on these forums? why i never!
Yeah it's a fucking Christmas miracle right in front of our eyes!
Too bad it will be ignored.
Bartoni's Law definition: As an Internet discussion grows volatile, the probability of a comparison involving Donald Trump approaches 1.
Heh , it's funny how every new release ends up with such a thread. And this brings me back a few years of when R.O.S.E Online first came out , the servers were flooding mad , people all hyped , discussions of a confirmed WoW killer was born ... now fast forward a year later after release , a dead MMO with barely no one on.
To tell if SWtOR will suffer the same fate as R.O.S.E , I highly doubt it , but only time will tell , it's been barely 2 months since TOR released and the game is still hyped atm. Let's see how the servers will look like come June/July while everyone is on school break and vacation. If TOR numbers declines , then yeah It's safe to say that TOR wasn't that great a success.
Also don't forget that alot of GW 1 players are playing SWTOR awaitting the release of GW2. A MMO isn't a standalone game like Skyrim where initial sales means success , keeping your players in game and having somewhat of a growth month after month is what qualifies a success when it comes to a MMO , regardless of how many copies have been sold on release. Hell just look at how dissapointing STO was , even F2P it's still suffering.
Excellent post. Wish we could see more of these type of posts instead of the blind hatred/fanboy drivel that normally occur. Bravo, sir! Bravo!