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New X-Play piece on SWTOR
Thorkune
Member UncommonPosts: 1,969
I watched this earlier this evening and thought I would share it with those didn't get a chance to watch it:
http://www.g4tv.com/videos/57936/the-success-of-star-wars-the-old-republic/
Comments
They're about 4 months late with this news
MMOs played: WoW, Star Wars Galaxies, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Guild Wars, Planetside, Global Agenda, Star Trek Online, RIFT, Everquest 2, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, EvE online, APB
Best MMO Companies: Trion Worlds, ArenaNet, CCP
Worst MMO Companies: Electronic Arts
Who is this Blair Herter in my X-play?
Everything creates huge amounts of negativity on the internet, that's what the internet is for: Negativity, porn and lolcats.
Webb is such a WoW fangirl, I am surprised she was in on this piece.
Watch what the ticker at the bottom says as theyre talking.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
What this highlights is the complete laziness and incompetency of the 'game journalist.' That's all. There's no research to any claim. No questions. They don't even bother going to EA's Investor relations page. They just mindlessly repeat, with increasing inaccuracy, the state of the game from other fail-journalists all the way back to the Joystiq fail-journalist getting it wrong.
We were told 'subs' as of 12/31/2011. We were told SALES as of 01/31/2012. And that is all. Since then it' has been cricket's chirping for hard-and-fast numbers though we've had a bunch of BS about 'things are great." Well, they're not.
What this highlights is the complete laziness and incompetency of the 'game journalist.' That's all. There's no research to any claim. No questions. They don't even bother going to EA's Investor relations page. They just mindlessly repeat, with increasing inaccuracy, the state of the game from other fail-journalists all the way back to the Joystiq fail-journalist getting it wrong.
We were told 'subs' as of 12/31/2011. We were told SALES as of 01/31/2012. And that is all. Since then it' has been cricket's chirping for hard-and-fast numbers though we've had a bunch of BS about 'things are great." Well, they're not.
I wonder how much that spot cost.You do know that those people on G4TV arent really "journalists". I dont think most of them are even gamers.
They are ACTORS.
Thats like calling Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert "Political Journalists"
Tried: EQ2 - AC - EU - HZ - TR - MxO - TTO - WURM - SL - VG:SoH - PotBS - PS - AoC - WAR - DDO - SWTOR
Played: UO - EQ1 - AO - DAoC - NC - CoH/CoV - SWG - WoW - EVE - AA - LotRO - DFO - STO - FE - MO - RIFT
Playing: Skyrim
Following: The Repopulation
I want a Virtual World, not just a Game.
ITS TOO HARD! - Matt Firor (ZeniMax)
You criticize them for repeating inaccurate information and then you post that. We were told subs as of Feb 1st.
What this highlights is the complete laziness and incompetency of the 'game journalist.' That's all. There's no research to any claim. No questions. They don't even bother going to EA's Investor relations page. They just mindlessly repeat, with increasing inaccuracy, the state of the game from other fail-journalists all the way back to the Joystiq fail-journalist getting it wrong.
We were told 'subs' as of 12/31/2011. We were told SALES as of 01/31/2012. And that is all. Since then it' has been cricket's chirping for hard-and-fast numbers though we've had a bunch of BS about 'things are great." Well, they're not.
You criticize them for repeating inaccurate information and then you post that. We were told subs as of Feb 1st.
Please could you link the quote?I'll just repost what I said in another thread, we've gone over this many times.
From the conference call transcript (my comments in white):
"Frank D. Gibeau
Thanks, Eric. Today, I'm going to take you through some highlights from our biggest games in Q3, including some perspective on the launch and consumer experience with Star Wars: The Old Republic. I'll also take you through some of the games that we intend to release this quarter to complete our fiscal year."
Clearly they are not ONLY talking about what happened last quarter. He goes on to say:
"Our third global blockbuster in the quarter was Star Wars: The Old Republic....Let me offer some metrics on purchase and subscription that will help you understand this business. As John stated, we have sold through 2 million units of the game since December. We currently have a little over 1.7 million active subscribers. The rest have either not started playing yet or have opted out. This is an outstanding start for an MMO, and the metrics on engagement suggests players are loving the game. Unique log-ins are averaging about 1 million per day, and their average playtime is approximately 4 hours per day."
He is clearly talking about as things stood at the time of the conference call. Of the 2 million boxes sold since launch until Feb 1st, they have 300k who had cancelled or not started yet (likely a very small number). Before you are no longer an ACTIVE subscriber your subscription time has had to have run out. That means that approx. 300k people from launch had cancelled. If you bought the game in Jan you're still on your first month and your sub is considered "active". This is standard practice when talking about sub numbers.
They clarified this again later when someone asked a question:
Brian J. Pitz - UBS Investment Bank, Research Division
Great. And just one really quick follow-up. Can you give us a sense for how many of those 1.7 million active subs we could expect to convert to paying subs after the initial free month? How should we kind of think about that?
Answer:
Frank D. Gibeau
Yes, let me -- maybe what I can do is I'll define active subscribers for you, and then give you a little color on that. We're not going to be able to talk too deeply on conversion just because it's so early in the life of the product. We're only 10 days past our first month anniversary.
Meaning he's talking about Feb 1st since Jan 20th was the 1 month anniversary. He continues:
But essentially, we're using the industry standard for active subscribers. If anyone paying a subscription or playing on an active prepaid timecard, and those who have registered to play are still in the trial subscription period. I can tell you that the majority of the 1.7 million are paying subscribers for us currently, which is great considering we're only, like I said, 42 days into the launch, and you have a 30-day trial period. So a lot of people are voting that they want to be a part of the service and are engaged, which is great news.
Can we stop with the spin now? They were clearly talking current as of Feb 1st.
Wouldn't a showing of the breakdown of the most current weeks 'account activity' be a much more accurate measure?
If 1.7 million accounts were all spending 5+ hours, in the most recent week, it would be a rather strong encodorsement for the game. However, fewer than that, might indicate a much lower customer satisfaction rate.
http://www.colbertsuperpac.com/
I'm not sure how anyone who has played the game like it or not could take that seriously, sounds like it was written by the bioware marketing team (more than likely was). Its pretty easy to judge the health of the game, just log in. When they said they were keeping a large portion of the team on to work on the game after launch, from the looks of it they are all in marketing considering its taken them 4 months to get the basic stuff in 1.2 but I'm constantly seeing crap about this game on the internet.
This is true, i worked with some of the folks from g4 and it blew my mind how little they knew about video games. What you got to understand is that they are just like any other TV channel, they are just TV people trying to make some TV shows. People that know about the games over there are the extreme minority, the rest are just TV people. People that you can pick up and drop on the hunting channel or something that they would be fine.
At most they know about as much about games as the average person.
WoW Sidequests
I suspected as much
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
So your criticism is that they speak to the average (read: typical) game player, and that they likely don't know who Raph Koster is, nor that Meridian 59 is considered the first MMO, nor any number of other grognard-ian, pointless minutiae about video games.
And so that makes them unqualified to relate their experiences to a broad audience who don't give a damn about those details. Gotcha.
Excuse me while I fucking role on the floor laughing.
You all just hate, HATE, that people are enjoying this game, lol. It's sad really.
Anyone else remember the phrase talking heads? it's still fascinating to me that people can be taken in by something repeated in every medium over and over even when it's false and still believe it.
it's mathematically impossible to have the same number of subs every month. new people will join, people will leave and sometimes en masse. It's just the way things are. The fact that they have yet to release the real numbers should be troubling for most but I think they are planning this more from a 1.2 standpoint that when 1.2 releases they might see a boom again and then that's all we'll hear about for the next 6 months is how they're numbers were 1.8 million subs.
It's quite hilarious.
The only people at G4TV that are really hardcore gamers are the people on Feedback, an actual good source of conversation about video games.
An idiot who tries desperately to be funny but fails at every turn. What a waste of space.
Adam Sessler looks like an escaped mental patient. His shoulders have a habit of being constantly mistaken for a metal clothes hanger.
Too bad X-Play doesn't have a 'spacebar' option. :-p
HAHAHAHA! -_-
TOR is a success? Good! Perhaps they can afford to give thinking players an $80 refund for that piece of garbage?
http://wyrdblogging.blogspot.com/
Ugh what drivel. The things I would do to sell out 'journalists' if I wouldnt get caught.
So, what exactly is untrue here? Last I heard, Bioware and EA has stated that the game had 1.7 million subscribers and I believe that was the beginning of March. I don't see a lot wrong with that piece besides it not being a very deep piece but I'm not sure if you go to G4 for that kind of information.
The bottom line and I saw this in an earlier Guild Wars 2 post so I think it's fitting here.
Haters gonna Hate!