Monorojo, I hope in 3 months when those numbers are revised to 500,000 you are here to eat crow. Actually, I doubt people would still be following SWTOR to even care to predict its pathetic retention rate, including you.
This is the same guy that also agreed that TOR would have 2 million subscribers by end of CY2012.
This is the same guy that months before called the game "highly derivative" and "unimpressive."
Check him out... he offers a lot of analysis about VG... I don't see anything to make me think he knows more about game sales than anyone in these forums. Hell... he bases his conclusions off of TOR server stats sites... c'mon.
I do the same thing and have probably put a lot more research and thought into it than this guy... 1.25 million paying subscribers just doesn't sound right. Maybe there will be some way to fudge those numbers up - but I'd put a reasonable estimate of people actually paying $15/mo @ 800k (and falling...)
I would think it would be hard to have an accurate analysis without actual numbers released by EA/Bioware. In my opinion one would need actual subscription numbers from key dates to get an idea of what the future holds for SWTOR and its player base.
If I am not mistaken my first bill for SWTOR was on 01-18-2012 so the first date we need the actual subscriber numbers from is 01-19-2012 and every XX-19-2012 thereafter. With a few key dates thrown in – 04-19-2012, 07-19-2012, 10-19-2012, 01-19-2013.
The ones highlighted in red are the renewal date for a 3 month and 6 month subs (first time). We also don’t know (well I don’t at least) what EA considers a subscriber (IE do trial accounts count as a subscriber) and how many people were going to quit prior to 4-19-2012 but decided to stick around for the free month.
1.25 million "active" subscribers or 1.25 million paying subscribers?
Originally posted by Treebyrn
(IE do trial accounts count as a subscriber)
I think Bioware would include trial accounts as subscribers, because trial access is a form of arranged access. They included players who had a free month in that 1.7 million number. I doubt they would pass down another way to bloat numbers.
Should be "Analyst predicts just 450k subs by Q1 2013"
That seems more plausable
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)
BW knows their game better than any analyst and even they couldn't predict the massive drop in subs after only a few months release, if they could have predicted it they would not have released the POS when they did. Analyst are not taking into account the massive impact that games like TSW and GW2 will have on TOR.
I applaud anyone still playing TOR. I had 2million credits on my account and still canceled a month ago and feel they should pay me for wasting all those hours I did in their ultra ordinary sub par attempt at an MMO. I would litteraly rather play nothing than play TOR. IMO Rift puts TOR to so much shame it's not even funny. No Rift doesn't have the billion dollar IP and no where near the budget but game engine, grafics and smoothness are so much better. Had Trion had $100M and the Star Wars IP they really could have done it justice. BW execs that made these questionable game decision such as Ohlen and Dickenson should be fired IMO.
Originally posted by FOXBusiness The share price of Electronic Arts (EA: 14.76, -0.32, -2.09%) slid today, reaching and then falling even farther past its previous 52-week low of $14.87 to $14.70. The stock was trading on below-average volume. After trading at a volume of 5.8 million, shares fell 2.1%.
MMORPG genre is dead. Long live MMOCS (Massively Multiplayer Online Cash Shop).
At the end of Q1 of fiscal year 2013, the analyst group is predicting a fall in subscriptions to 1.25 million.
That is an amazing retention rate when you think about it, and all the dom and gloom posts here would not lead one to believe that 1.25 out of 1.7 million would stay subbed. That would give SWTOr at 73% retention rate since Januaryy. Many here have been vehemtly stating that sub number are likely already under 1million. Guess that shuts that crowd up eh?
Anyway, good news for Bioware!
It doesn't matter. The majority of people on this site know the "truth" and that truth is the one that suits them best...
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
I'm sorry but I'll take the word of real anaylsts over armchair analysis like the above any day. Do you believe that these analyst, whose job it is to report numbers and whose credibility depends on the accuracy os said numbers, don't know about xfire and other sties that some kids on MMORPG.com know about?
They have obviously taken these into the equation, and realize like most of us that you cannot do a straight conversion that many here attempt to do.
You truly have no idea how "analysts" work or get their numbers in this or other fields. I wouldn't press my point further if I were you.
This is coming to a shock to some people, especially on this site. There are.... are you ready for this??? People, like myself, who actually enjoy the game. Yes, it's true. Not to say the game doesn't have shortcomings but they're not deal-breakers for me and I appreciate the work that I've seen on the newest game update and while I think they need to start offering things like chracter transfers and begin merging some of the servers, I'm happy with the product. At the end of the day, that's what's important.
Analysts are a dime a dozen in every economic sector who speculate based on how they are interpreting the information before them. Take stocks for instance, for every analyst predicting a that a security is going to be up 6-12 months in the future, there is one who says the opposite. The only time that this does not happen is when the market independently provides overt signs that spell out the obvious to everybody; this is not the case with SWTOR.
I imagine this whole debate is going to be settled during Q2 or Q3 when EA's public disclosure will leave a more accurate picture as to the state of SWTOR considering the amount of money that went into its development.
EA's stock price plummeting approx 72% over the past 4 years is not an encouraging sign when comparing them against other companies in the same sector. If SWTOR is not generating substantial revenue it is going to stick out like a sore thumb and no amount of marketing spin will be able to hide it.
The only certainty as of right now is that EA/Bioware just flushed a huge wad of cash down the crapper giving away a free month of service to SWTOR customers which is not something a stable business does, especially in a fragile market.
Analysts are a dime a dozen in every economic sector who speculate based on how they are interpreting the information before them. Take stocks for instance, for every analyst predicting a that a security is going to be up 6-12 months in the future, there is one who says the opposite. The only time that this does not happen is when the market independently provides overt signs that spell out the obvious to everybody; this is not the case with SWTOR.
I imagine this whole debate is going to be settled during Q2 or Q3 when EA's public disclosure will leave a more accurate picture as to the state of SWTOR considering the amount of money that went into its development.
EA's stock price plummeting approx 72% over the past 4 years is not an encouraging sign when comparing them against other companies in the same sector. If SWTOR is not generating substantial revenue it is going to stick out like a sore thumb and no amount of marketing spin will be able to hide it.
The only certainty as of right now is that EA/Bioware just flushed a huge wad of cash down the crapper giving away a free month of service to SWTOR customers which is not something a stable business does, especially in a fragile market.
Right on the money. An analyst isnt privy to inside info that isnt publicly available. So his analysis is based on already padded numbers. As long as he hasnt done an in-depth online check of the servers or seen what other people have gathered about current player numbers he will be way off.
I would be very surprised if this game has over 600k subs today.
This number is inflated by the free month. If any number is going to be indicitive of anything negative or posititive, it will be sub numbers in a months time. Any other speculation or so called professionals best guess about numbers up until that point isnt worth the bytes it was written on.
At the end of Q1 of fiscal year 2013, the analyst group is predicting a fall in subscriptions to 1.25 million.
That is an amazing retention rate when you think about it, and all the dom and gloom posts here would not lead one to believe that 1.25 out of 1.7 million would stay subbed. That would give SWTOr at 73% retention rate since Januaryy. Many here have been vehemtly stating that sub number are likely already under 1million. Guess that shuts that crowd up eh?
Anyway, good news for Bioware!
Retention rate? You're forgetting the new subscribers. I'm not an analyst myself, but 1.2m subscribers after all the marketing, the high inversion and the big IP doesn't sound that good.
Name one other MMO, other than WoW, which has ever had 1.2M subscribers.
You guys are all acting like 1.2M subscribers is complete crap, and meanwhile no other game in the history of MMO's has ever achieved even that. Geesh.
Aion and Lineage both had more than 1.2 million subs. Aion once had over 3 million subs.
Did you really have to split the original thread discussion into a new one ?
Anyway, as I wrote in the other :
Considering the 4 other mastodon MMOs being released this year (Pandaria, GW2, TERA, and to an extent, Secret World), and considering the general dissatisfaction gamers have felt towards the title, only estimating a 500.000 loss in one year is totally unrealistic. It's not like there was one sole concurrent, there are four ... and four big, big ones. 500.000 is :
- half what WoW lost in a year, but long time players will move back to Pandaria, at least to try it
- at least half the estimated number of GW2 players
- grossly the number of TERA expected players, and a little less for Secret World (considering old sub numbers like AoC, WAR, Rift, etc during periods where WoW was still a huge challenger).
I wonder where this analyst comes from. I sense pure damage control PR.
***** Before hitting that reply button, please READ the WHOLE thread you're about to post in *****
From the link it looks like an analyst from from an outside company. Furthermore it sounds like their predicting this not based off of hard info, but based off the reports EA has been giving out, which many of us know to be rather BS.
Just think of it this way, the 1.7m number they keep floating around is from fairly early in their launch cycle (back when a vast majority of servers were sitting at heavy - full). Now almost no servers are sitting at heavy, let alone full, with most being at light all the time. Now if we go by some of the sites that have tried to quanitify this data, there has been a HUGE drop in population since february. We're talking ~ 50% drop or so if not a little more. The population does seem to have stabilized now. But if their starting number is around 1.7m, then cut that in half, and you have a much more accurate figure to go with.
This still means they'd be sitting at a little less than a mil, though. ~ 800-900k. Which isn't a bad population. But it does mean they are going to have to start merging stuff very soon. Another thing that most of us already know.
It's illegal to falsify records for the purpose of making your public corporation look better. Electronic Arts being a publically traded corporation would go bankrupt with law suits if it was discovered they had lied about these numbers.
Play the game. A few full servers and the majority are dead. Q2 resub and new sub rates will tell the true story.
Free 30 days
25 free trial handouts per player
Email spam to come back
NO END GAME that justifies a 14.99 sub
Bioware/EA folding to the qq on their forums (eg freebies, not content)
Something is really wrong with their tech - massive instancing, cannot rollout pvp fixes, lagfest when ilum was active, rely on a drab playet hub (eg physically small repetive structure- with bare bone visuals).
HORRIBLE word of mouth (perhaps the fastest game killer)
Niche star war fan game that will be lucky to have 500K paying subs in a few months.
Just play- come to your own conclusions. Be honest with yourself- would you recommend 2-3 friends to pay for this game?
It's illegal to falsify records for the purpose of making your public corporation look better. Electronic Arts being a publically traded corporation would go bankrupt with law suits if it was discovered they had lied about these numbers.
True, but at the same time what is "true" in terms of subscription numbers? And how important are they to the overall report? Isn't the financials the ACTUAL meat in these reports? My point is that this is a somewhat grey area. Lots of other publicly traded companies fiddle with their numbers to make it look good. Look at GM and how they stuff their retailer chain with surpluss cars. As long as they can offhand them to the dealers they can make it look like "sales", although the retailer inventory is burgeoning without much of a sales increase.
And outright lies in terms of financial reporting isnt exactly uncommon either. A number of publicly traded companies have had such practices. Enron is one of the biggies, but also Lehman Brothers. The same charade is still going strong in the financial sector where they pad their numbers to make it look good.
There is no need to be so gullible about this. You ALWAYS need to look deep and at the broader picture when you try to analyze the health of a company.
I am thinking it will settle in at 400-500k western type paying subs.... I voted that it would hit somewhere around 3-4 million, before it was launched, due to budget, BW, and figuring the game would be better than it was.... I highly doubt it can stay about 1 million paying subs, and with the budget, larger mmo market, that is a major disappointment imo.... Lucas cannot be happy, with what he must term another failure, since he wasn't happy with 350k or so with SWG, with a smaller mmo market.
Name one other MMO, other than WoW, which has ever had 1.2M subscribers. You guys are all acting like 1.2M subscribers is complete crap, and meanwhile no other game in the history of MMO's has ever achieved even that. Geesh.
Hm,
I created a MMO for 50M and have 500k subs Or I created a MMO for 200? 300? 150? M and have like "estimated" current 1.25M subs
Comments
Oh you're gonna come down so hard lol.
Monorojo, I hope in 3 months when those numbers are revised to 500,000 you are here to eat crow. Actually, I doubt people would still be following SWTOR to even care to predict its pathetic retention rate, including you.
This is the same guy that also agreed that TOR would have 2 million subscribers by end of CY2012.
This is the same guy that months before called the game "highly derivative" and "unimpressive."
Check him out... he offers a lot of analysis about VG... I don't see anything to make me think he knows more about game sales than anyone in these forums. Hell... he bases his conclusions off of TOR server stats sites... c'mon.
I do the same thing and have probably put a lot more research and thought into it than this guy... 1.25 million paying subscribers just doesn't sound right. Maybe there will be some way to fudge those numbers up - but I'd put a reasonable estimate of people actually paying $15/mo @ 800k (and falling...)
I would think it would be hard to have an accurate analysis without actual numbers released by EA/Bioware. In my opinion one would need actual subscription numbers from key dates to get an idea of what the future holds for SWTOR and its player base.
If I am not mistaken my first bill for SWTOR was on 01-18-2012 so the first date we need the actual subscriber numbers from is 01-19-2012 and every XX-19-2012 thereafter. With a few key dates thrown in – 04-19-2012, 07-19-2012, 10-19-2012, 01-19-2013.
The ones highlighted in red are the renewal date for a 3 month and 6 month subs (first time). We also don’t know (well I don’t at least) what EA considers a subscriber (IE do trial accounts count as a subscriber) and how many people were going to quit prior to 4-19-2012 but decided to stick around for the free month.
1.25 million "active" subscribers or 1.25 million paying subscribers?
I think Bioware would include trial accounts as subscribers, because trial access is a form of arranged access. They included players who had a free month in that 1.7 million number. I doubt they would pass down another way to bloat numbers.
Are you sure there isnt a typo in the title?
Should be "Analyst predicts just 450k subs by Q1 2013"
That seems more plausable
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)
BW knows their game better than any analyst and even they couldn't predict the massive drop in subs after only a few months release, if they could have predicted it they would not have released the POS when they did. Analyst are not taking into account the massive impact that games like TSW and GW2 will have on TOR.
I applaud anyone still playing TOR. I had 2million credits on my account and still canceled a month ago and feel they should pay me for wasting all those hours I did in their ultra ordinary sub par attempt at an MMO. I would litteraly rather play nothing than play TOR. IMO Rift puts TOR to so much shame it's not even funny. No Rift doesn't have the billion dollar IP and no where near the budget but game engine, grafics and smoothness are so much better. Had Trion had $100M and the Star Wars IP they really could have done it justice. BW execs that made these questionable game decision such as Ohlen and Dickenson should be fired IMO.
MMORPG genre is dead. Long live MMOCS (Massively Multiplayer Online Cash Shop).
It doesn't matter. The majority of people on this site know the "truth" and that truth is the one that suits them best...
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
You truly have no idea how "analysts" work or get their numbers in this or other fields. I wouldn't press my point further if I were you.
This is coming to a shock to some people, especially on this site. There are.... are you ready for this??? People, like myself, who actually enjoy the game. Yes, it's true. Not to say the game doesn't have shortcomings but they're not deal-breakers for me and I appreciate the work that I've seen on the newest game update and while I think they need to start offering things like chracter transfers and begin merging some of the servers, I'm happy with the product. At the end of the day, that's what's important.
Question is.... do they realy belive that there was 1.7 million players at the 1st place?
They should be happy to end up this year with 350-500k ppl.
Analysts are a dime a dozen in every economic sector who speculate based on how they are interpreting the information before them. Take stocks for instance, for every analyst predicting a that a security is going to be up 6-12 months in the future, there is one who says the opposite. The only time that this does not happen is when the market independently provides overt signs that spell out the obvious to everybody; this is not the case with SWTOR.
I imagine this whole debate is going to be settled during Q2 or Q3 when EA's public disclosure will leave a more accurate picture as to the state of SWTOR considering the amount of money that went into its development.
EA's stock price plummeting approx 72% over the past 4 years is not an encouraging sign when comparing them against other companies in the same sector. If SWTOR is not generating substantial revenue it is going to stick out like a sore thumb and no amount of marketing spin will be able to hide it.
The only certainty as of right now is that EA/Bioware just flushed a huge wad of cash down the crapper giving away a free month of service to SWTOR customers which is not something a stable business does, especially in a fragile market.
Right on the money. An analyst isnt privy to inside info that isnt publicly available. So his analysis is based on already padded numbers. As long as he hasnt done an in-depth online check of the servers or seen what other people have gathered about current player numbers he will be way off.
I would be very surprised if this game has over 600k subs today.
This number is inflated by the free month. If any number is going to be indicitive of anything negative or posititive, it will be sub numbers in a months time. Any other speculation or so called professionals best guess about numbers up until that point isnt worth the bytes it was written on.
This is what I have to say about that analysis:
They would be lucky to have 500k subs by that time.
My gaming blog
Aion and Lineage both had more than 1.2 million subs. Aion once had over 3 million subs.
My gaming blog
Hold on, isn't this the guy that predicted that GTA Chinatown Wars would sell 2,000,000 (that is two million) games for the DS IN THE US ALONE?
That is two million games just for the DS, just in the US.
/checks global sales of GTA Chinatown Wars.
Oh, yeah, NOW I believe his analysis.
Don Quixote's Delusions
Did you really have to split the original thread discussion into a new one ?
Anyway, as I wrote in the other :
Considering the 4 other mastodon MMOs being released this year (Pandaria, GW2, TERA, and to an extent, Secret World), and considering the general dissatisfaction gamers have felt towards the title, only estimating a 500.000 loss in one year is totally unrealistic. It's not like there was one sole concurrent, there are four ... and four big, big ones. 500.000 is :
- half what WoW lost in a year, but long time players will move back to Pandaria, at least to try it
- at least half the estimated number of GW2 players
- grossly the number of TERA expected players, and a little less for Secret World (considering old sub numbers like AoC, WAR, Rift, etc during periods where WoW was still a huge challenger).
I wonder where this analyst comes from. I sense pure damage control PR.
***** Before hitting that reply button, please READ the WHOLE thread you're about to post in *****
It's illegal to falsify records for the purpose of making your public corporation look better. Electronic Arts being a publically traded corporation would go bankrupt with law suits if it was discovered they had lied about these numbers.
Website: http://www.thegameguru.me / YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/users/thetroublmaker
Free 30 days
25 free trial handouts per player
Email spam to come back
NO END GAME that justifies a 14.99 sub
Bioware/EA folding to the qq on their forums (eg freebies, not content)
Something is really wrong with their tech - massive instancing, cannot rollout pvp fixes, lagfest when ilum was active, rely on a drab playet hub (eg physically small repetive structure- with bare bone visuals).
HORRIBLE word of mouth (perhaps the fastest game killer)
Niche star war fan game that will be lucky to have 500K paying subs in a few months.
Just play- come to your own conclusions. Be honest with yourself- would you recommend 2-3 friends to pay for this game?
True, but at the same time what is "true" in terms of subscription numbers? And how important are they to the overall report? Isn't the financials the ACTUAL meat in these reports? My point is that this is a somewhat grey area. Lots of other publicly traded companies fiddle with their numbers to make it look good. Look at GM and how they stuff their retailer chain with surpluss cars. As long as they can offhand them to the dealers they can make it look like "sales", although the retailer inventory is burgeoning without much of a sales increase.
And outright lies in terms of financial reporting isnt exactly uncommon either. A number of publicly traded companies have had such practices. Enron is one of the biggies, but also Lehman Brothers. The same charade is still going strong in the financial sector where they pad their numbers to make it look good.
There is no need to be so gullible about this. You ALWAYS need to look deep and at the broader picture when you try to analyze the health of a company.
I am thinking it will settle in at 400-500k western type paying subs.... I voted that it would hit somewhere around 3-4 million, before it was launched, due to budget, BW, and figuring the game would be better than it was.... I highly doubt it can stay about 1 million paying subs, and with the budget, larger mmo market, that is a major disappointment imo.... Lucas cannot be happy, with what he must term another failure, since he wasn't happy with 350k or so with SWG, with a smaller mmo market.
Hm,
I created a MMO for 50M and have 500k subs
Or
I created a MMO for 200? 300? 150? M and have like "estimated" current 1.25M subs
*cough*