Bioware numbers spin, and is SWTOR really a success, a dissection.

smh_alot · February 2012

Originally posted by Axehilt

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.)

Ah damn, you sound so reasonable, even using common sense. Careful, too much of this might be a bannable offense :-D

Nadia · February 2012

Originally posted by Loke666
I don´t think we can see if TOR is a success or not for months yet.

I agree - their next quarter financials will give a better picture

Lidane · February 2012

Originally posted by bartoni33
To put it straight out there: You are fools for making such a fuss over numbers and opinions on A GAME. You will NOT convince anyone that likes TOR to not like it. Please stop making we-tod-ed post like this, please. Please. Please? With troll fat on top? Please?

blognorg · February 2012

Is it true that Rift only had a budget of 50 million? That's impressive.

Hrimnir · February 2012

Originally posted by FrodoFragins

Originally posted by Hrimnir
Do you have any numbers on what % of WOW players play every day? Many people work, have kids, responsibilities. Only the hardcore log in every day. The 1 million unique logins per day sounds fine to me. Certainly some of that 1.7million have quit, but many others may only play a few nights a week or weekends.

No, of course i dont have any numbers, The point is you're comparing a game which has been out for the better part of 8 years to a heavily hyped, newly released BIG IP game. Again we're talking about LOGINS, not hours played, LOGINS.

It's a launch success yes. Better numbers than WOW or your little Rift after one month. You can't judge the future success yet.

Once again. WOW released a time when the entire MMO playerbase was about 2.5 million AT MOST. SWTOR released when the MMO playerbase is somewhere in the ballpark of 13-15 million people.

Comparing SWTOR to Rift is like comparing a movie made my Michael Bay starring Scarlett Johannson and Dwayne Johnson based on a well known IP to an indie movie made by a noname producer starring some actors who nobody knows who is. Thats my point. SWTOR had every reason to sell like hotcakes and it *barely* surpassed RIft's numbers.

How many are returning? Have asource for that? Rift sells their box for a piddling and already has gone to 20 levels free within a year. They've also merging servers but claim they are just becoming trial servers or some such. Rift is still a success, but it has no effect on SWTOR.

Yeah, the source is called guild chat and level 50 chat. Do i have hard numbers, of course not, i doubt even Trion has hard numbers, its not like they're asking anybody who resubs if they were returning from SWTOR.

vgchartz is not official - they simply guess.

I never stated or suggested they were official. Although its pretty amusing that their "guess" is within 5% of Biowares quoted figures. Amazing...

So you think SWTOR should have sold more boxes than WOW has subscribers in USA and EU? That's a ludicrous statement. The biggest selling launch in MMO history can only be considered a successful launch.

Current estimates put WOW's EU and US subscriber base in the ballpark of 4.5-5mil, Add to that the people playing Rift, EQ2, EQ1, LOTRO, etc etc etc (totalling somewhere in the range of 800k-1mil) and you have roughly 5.5-6mil potential customers.

Wow is almost 8 years old and releases content at a snails pace. EQ2 is the same age, and although has been good about content, still has a lot of disgruntled players. Same thing with LOTRO, EQ1, AoC, etc.

The MMO market has been literally waiting for "the next big thing" for half a decade, SWTOR was supposed to be just that. Yet, it managed to attract roughly 1/3 of the entire MMO playerbase? And is having trouble retaining those customers. Yeah, big success there.

Now we get to your motivation.

Yes, surprise! I'm not a journalist, i have no obligation to be unbiased or not have an agenda with my post, AMAZING!

Nadia · February 2012

Originally posted by Axehilt
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.

Vgchartz has an editorial at their site - heres a quote

http://www.vgchartz.com/article/82746/editorial-why-it-is-so-easy-to-blame-vgchartz/

What VGChartz offers is timely data that isn't meant to be 100% accurate but be in the right range.

We don't compete with the likes of NPD, GFK or ChartTrack; we offer a service that is totally different.

(Our service) is not based on comprehensive and direct retail tracking, but rather uses modern and alternative methods to quickly arrive at estimates, combined with a database of historical sales - constantly adjusted and tweaked to be as accurate as possible

Painlezz · February 2012

OP failed his own thread....

Lets say game only has 1.7 million subs.

1.0 million unique logins per day...

43% you say? So on average close to 50% of the players log in once per day? Sounds perfectly logical to me. What happens when you get 50, and get gear? You're done... So why would you log in EVERY day?

WoW had 15 or some million subs? Do you think 7 million people logged in EVERY DAY? I'm going to say very likely not... They had a TON of subs, and a lot of them were probably only semi-active. I know two female gamers who have active subs to WoW and probably play it twice a month? They like the idea of being a "nerd" WoW hottie but they don't really enjoy putting much time into the game itself.

Lots of people buy multi-month subs and won't play for weeks while they're off enjoying some new Xbox or PS3 game that came out...

Useless thread here, with no purpose other than to flame and spread hate about SWTOR. I quite SWTOR weeks and week ago, I find it to be a very week MMORPG... and a sloppy single player Mass Effect / KOTOR knock-off. I do not like it. But I don't like logging into MMORPG.com and seeing nothing but endless complaining, trolling, and flames. GW2 is going to be an epic failure just like everything else has been, and all those fanboys will get the same thing the SWTOR fanboys got when this game came out.

Lets all go play LOTRO!

Cthulhu23 · February 2012

Originally posted by BilboDoggins
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.

Well, your guild sucks. Sorry. My guild is very active, and there has been no drop off in activity since we formed. The core players are still there playing, and we've added a lot of new players that are playing the heck out of the game.

I don't think judging the game's success based on one guild, good or bad, proves much.

But feel free to keep trying to invent reasons why this game isn't popular.

Mephster · February 2012

Someone better recheck the date on that paper if they are saying 1.7 mill subs! I just lol !

Mondo80 · February 2012

They said "If we can have 500k subs, we will be profitable" before they released the game. if they can keep roughly that number of players in the game and happy , they'll be fine.

Hrimnir · February 2012

Originally posted by Axehilt
A. Speaking of numbers spin, the OP cited a source (VGChartz) which indicates ToR sold 2.11m boxes while RIFT sold 0.50m boxes.

As other users have stated VGChartz tracks retail sales, not digital, so, *if* thats the case then the numbers for Rift would be wildly inaccurate as they most sold digital downloads. Either way, the point is i took that number from a PRO SWTOR thread. I'm only using that number to provide a timeline of sales.

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.

See above

C. Who the hell cares? Do you like RIFT? Then play it. Do you like ToR? Then play it.

I care. The point is we have all been forced to play crappy WOW clones for the last 7-8 years because developers are trying to pull a recording industry card and just make formulaic rehashed BS and expect it to sell well. If players continue to gobble this trash up and proclaim it the greatest evar, it will only make things worse.

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.

The game doesnt have 2 million players, it sold 2 million boxes. Age of conan Sold close to 1.5 million boxes and lost 70% of those in 2 months. The game had barely 100k less than a year later. Warhammer sold in the mid 1 million range and same thing, lost 50-60% of those in 2-3 months time and now hovers in the 100k sub range. Citing an MMO's initial sales is NOT a sign of success.

Rift, on the other hand, since people LOVE to dog on that game. Actually sold more copies and gained more players even 6 months after release. Thats the definition of success. this is evidenced by the fact that investors having handed them 80 million more dollars to get the game setup for the Asian markets.

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.

Once again, we have to account for the fact that this is a BRAND NEW GAME. And one thats been HEAVILY hyped.

You will not get me to believe that a person who buys a brand new game is not going to be playing the shit out of that game at every waking opportunity for the first couple of weeks they own it. In the case of an MMO its not difficult to extrapolate that out to 30 days later, when supposedly the game has 120 hours of "content" for people to play through. A casual player is not going to play 120 hours in 1 months. So, its actually a very REASONABLE assumption that they will LOGIN at least 1 time per day.

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.)

Nice job with the math failures, first of all you havent taken into account that Lucasarts is being compensated for use of their IP (conservative estimates put this figure at 20% of profits) So, right off the bat, take 20% off anything you've posted and send it straight to lucasarts. Secondarily, you're not accounting for advertising. The 200m figure was for development costs. They've likely spent 10-30m advertising the game as well. Thirdly, your assuming that subscriptions are a 100% profit. They're not. A couple years back a business website did an article on MMO's using WOW as the primary example and discovered that Subscriptions are about 60% profit.

So, lets use these more realistic numbers and see where things end up:

131m - 20% = 104.8 million from box/digital sales. Lets take your less conservative estimate, since im feeling nice, and take those 1.7 million subs, and account for 40% operating costs. and bam, now we're at 42.36m, oh wait, lets not forget about Lucasarts 20%, no we're at 33.9m

So this is 5 months after release. and they've made ~ 139 million back out of their 210-230m spent. A deficit of 71million dollars.

We've used your higher assumption on subs/bleed rates, and that puts us after 5 months at around 400k subscribers. lets just assume things have leveled out at this point and that they're going to keep 100% of those 400k subs for the long run. Now, assume some of these people are going to be purchasing multi-month subscriptions, and we'll be nice and say they're averaging $14/mo from those subscribers. So, now we're at $5.6million a month, - 40% operating costs, - 20% lucasarts cut. And that means profits of 2.7million per month (rounding up). So, that means assuming 100% retention rate of their current 5 month out subscriber rate they're going to take 26 and some change months, or 2 years and 2 months or so, to recoup what they spent just to develop and advertise the game.

The only way this game will be truly successful is if it retains at least 1 million subs 6+ months from now.

bartoni33 · February 2012

Originally posted by Painlezz
OP failed his own thread....
<redundancy cut>

That was sufficient enough. Like writing a long post on how liquid water is wet.

PyrateLV · February 2012

Originally posted by Hrimnir

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.

Literally cant find a bigger IP? Serious? Hmm, how about Star Trek? It came 11 years before Star Wars and has at least as big a fanbase if not bigger.

laokoko · February 2012

oh wow. swtor spent 200m on the game and another 10-30m on advertisement? where do people get this number.

Hrimnir · February 2012

Originally posted by Painlezz
OP failed his own thread....

Lets say game only has 1.7 million subs.

1.0 million unique logins per day...

43% you say? So on average close to 50% of the players log in once per day? Sounds perfectly logical to me. What happens when you get 50, and get gear? You're done... So why would you log in EVERY day?

So, by your logic you're suggesting that 50% of the playerbase has already reached level 50 and gotten every bit of gear and has no reason to log in? Who is the one failing at their own thread now?

WoW had 15 or some million subs? Do you think 7 million people logged in EVERY DAY? I'm going to say very likely not... They had a TON of subs, and a lot of them were probably only semi-active. I know two female gamers who have active subs to WoW and probably play it twice a month? They like the idea of being a "nerd" WoW hottie but they don't really enjoy putting much time into the game itself.

You're going to use attention whores as your repartee to my comment? awesome...

Lots of people buy multi-month subs and won't play for weeks while they're off enjoying some new Xbox or PS3 game that came out...

Yes, for games that have been out for years. Not for brand new games released on the Star Wars IP...

Useless thread here, with no purpose other than to flame and spread hate about SWTOR. I quite SWTOR weeks and week ago, I find it to be a very week MMORPG... and a sloppy single player Mass Effect / KOTOR knock-off. I do not like it. But I don't like logging into MMORPG.com and seeing nothing but endless complaining, trolling, and flames. GW2 is going to be an epic failure just like everything else has been, and all those fanboys will get the same thing the SWTOR fanboys got when this game came out.

Hey pot, this is kettle...

GMan3 · February 2012

Originally posted by Hrimnir

Originally posted by Painlezz

OP failed his own thread....

Lets say game only has 1.7 million subs.

1.0 million unique logins per day...

43% you say? So on average close to 50% of the players log in once per day? Sounds perfectly logical to me. What happens when you get 50, and get gear? You're done... So why would you log in EVERY day?

So, by your logic you're suggesting that 50% of the playerbase has already reached level 50 and gotten every bit of gear and has no reason to log in? Who is the one failing at their own thread now?

WoW had 15 or some million subs? Do you think 7 million people logged in EVERY DAY? I'm going to say very likely not... They had a TON of subs, and a lot of them were probably only semi-active. I know two female gamers who have active subs to WoW and probably play it twice a month? They like the idea of being a "nerd" WoW hottie but they don't really enjoy putting much time into the game itself.

You're going to use attention whores as your repartee to my comment? awesome...

Lots of people buy multi-month subs and won't play for weeks while they're off enjoying some new Xbox or PS3 game that came out...

Yes, for games that have been out for years. Not for brand new games released on the Star Wars IP...

Useless thread here, with no purpose other than to flame and spread hate about SWTOR. I quite SWTOR weeks and week ago, I find it to be a very week MMORPG... and a sloppy single player Mass Effect / KOTOR knock-off. I do not like it. But I don't like logging into MMORPG.com and seeing nothing but endless complaining, trolling, and flames. GW2 is going to be an epic failure just like everything else has been, and all those fanboys will get the same thing the SWTOR fanboys got when this game came out.

Hey pot, this is kettle...

Hmmm . . . useless reply from the originator to the thread. Not a surprise really. His logic was fuzzy to begin with and has only gotten worse.

Njai15 · February 2012

Originally posted by PyrateLV

Originally posted by Hrimnir

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.

Literally cant find a bigger IP? Serious? Hmm, how about Star Trek? It came 11 years before Star Wars and has at least as big a fanbase if not bigger.

You're crazy Star Wars is more universal... I was born in the 80s, Star Wars was always more relevant then Star Trek. Star Tours at disneyland, Yoda and Ewoks, light sabers.

George Lucas was able to market Star Wars merchandise so well, before the prequels came out there was a constant stream of new toys and products based on a 20 year old movie.

Hrimnir · February 2012

Originally posted by PyrateLV

Originally posted by Hrimnir

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.

Literally cant find a bigger IP? Serious? Hmm, how about Star Trek? It came 11 years before Star Wars and has at least as big a fanbase if not bigger.

Yes, star trek came out earlier, that doesnt mean its bigger than star wars.

New big budget Star Trek movies comes out:

grossed $385mil

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(film)

New Big Budget Star Wars movie came out:

grossed $924mil (not accounting for inflation, if you account for inflation its 1.178 billion)

Total number of star trek movies made: 11

Total number of star wars movies made: 6

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films#Highest-grossing_franchises_and_film_series

Total accrued gross box office from star trek: who knows, not even in the top 20 on the list

Edit, found it, http://boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=startrek.htm, slightly over 1 billion.

Total accrued gross box office from star wars: $4.41 billion

This is just accounting for movies side of things. How many successful star wars games have been made versus star trek? The needle is clearly pointing towards Star Wars in this situation.

Star Trek doesnt hold a candle to Star Wars in popularity.

Hrimnir · February 2012

Originally posted by laokoko
oh wow. swtor spent 200m on the game and another 10-30m on advertisement? where do people get this number.

Google it, you'll find pages of links confirming that number:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/20/ea-spent-only-200m-to-make-star-wars-the-old-republic/

There is a good one for you if you're being especially lazy.

laokoko · February 2012

Originally posted by Hrimnir

Originally posted by laokoko

oh wow. swtor spent 200m on the game and another 10-30m on advertisement? where do people get this number.

Google it, you'll find pages of links confirming that number:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/20/ea-spent-only-200m-to-make-star-wars-the-old-republic/

There is a good one for you if you're being especially lazy.

lol. If that's true I'll actually pick up the game.

I'm pretty sure in a few month the subscription will drop alot. But hopefully it'll have a decent number in the long run.

I havn't played it, but when I heard their skill attack is not very responsive, it's a big turnoff.

smh_alot · February 2012

Originally posted by blognorg

Is it true that Rift only had a budget of 50 million? That's impressive.

Actually, most AAA MMO budgets are around that number, AoC, WAR, WoW, they all hover around the 40-60 million dollar budget range. That's why it's so ridiculous, some of the estimations that are floating around when it comes to TOR's budget. Then again, they're all just speculations and analysts' guesses, no official numbers, but you'll always have people who gobble up all those wild guesses, each and every one of those >.>

Snaylor47 · February 2012

Originally posted by Hrimnir

Originally posted by laokoko

oh wow. swtor spent 200m on the game and another 10-30m on advertisement? where do people get this number.

Google it, you'll find pages of links confirming that number:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/20/ea-spent-only-200m-to-make-star-wars-the-old-republic/

There is a good one for you if you're being especially lazy.

Thats all speculation if I am reading it correctly.

Axehilt · February 2012

Originally posted by Nadia

Vgchartz has an editorial at their site - heres a quote

http://www.vgchartz.com/article/82746/editorial-why-it-is-so-easy-to-blame-vgchartz/

What VGChartz offers is timely data that isn't meant to be 100% accurate but be in the right range.

We don't compete with the likes of NPD, GFK or ChartTrack; we offer a service that is totally different.

(Our service) is not based on comprehensive and direct retail tracking, but rather uses modern and alternative methods to quickly arrive at estimates, combined with a database of historical sales - constantly adjusted and tweaked to be as accurate as possible

How is "wrong by 100%" considered "in the right range"?

At best, it's clear the site is only useful for vague comparitive trends.

If RIFT sold 1m, maybe ToR sold 4.22m (wrong by the same 100%)

4.22m sales @ (90% standard, 10% deluxe, 0% collectors) is $261.6m
4.22m sales @ (89% standard, 10% deluxe, 1% collectors) is $267.9m

Although the more I think about the 149.99 price point of collector's edition, I think even 1% might be a stretch. Still, even if it's half (0.5%) that's a comfy $3m or so. (:

maplestone · February 2012

Originally posted by Hrimnir 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.

It's a little hypocritical to expect people to approach your numbers with an open mind if you made them with a closed mind.

aranha · February 2012

Well all i can say is that by personal experience the server i was on the sith population dropped by about 50% after the first month. our 350 man guild dropped to a 160 man guild and some servers was so desolate that on primetime the sith mainhub had 5 players online..

Im not sure about the numbers but after the first month a higher ratio of players quit. Alot higher than most MMORPGs post first month!

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Bioware numbers spin, and is SWTOR really a success, a dissection.

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Bioware numbers spin, and is SWTOR *really* a success, a dissection.

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Bioware numbers spin, and is SWTOR really a success, a dissection.