Some of these "customers" here have made anti-SWTOR diatribes their main hobby.

EA did come up with SWTOR's cost late last year: 80 million US dollars spent in development, 20 million US dollars earmarked for marketing.

Except missing the parts they cut out to get it finally on sale...

As a Blizzard game, an heir to WoW Titan will sell probably as much as any WoW expansion so far even if it's the worse MMO ever. Long-time subscriptions are naturally another matter.

STO's developer Cryptic was sold to a Chinese F2P company by Atari, not exactly a similar situation with BW and EA.

As long as money flows in, I doubt that Blizzard cares. New challengers are also failing right and left, so that WoW might keep much of it's current subscribers until Titan comes out to give Blizzard another big payday.

I have no intention to unsubscribe.

Diablo 3 was in development from since 2001. Since 2001. Eleven years. It has to sell well for Blizzard to get the development costs back.

That it tries to drive the share price up.

They'll probably come up with "buy Panda expansion, get all D3 DLCs free" offer...

The game is unlikely to have 1.3 million subscribers anymore. It might have a third of that best, I think, after the free month and this comes from a person who likes this game very much and only hopes the best for it. I don't expect the game to be closed down, but I fear it will share WAR's fate. Few servers left, a triple-A game turned into a niche game that just barely lives on. Server mergers would just make things worse, it would be signal for all those who hedge their bets to jump overboard and leave this game behind. What this game needs is good publicity and more marketing in connection of new content to lure both old players back and get new players in. There are millions of potential buyers who haven't bought the game.

GW2 has gotten a pass from almost the whole game and mainstream press. And when they occasionally don't only praise that game, GW2 fans gather like a swarm of locusts to figuratively beat down the hapless critic until the person has understood to keep silent. The next saviour, considering Amalur's problem - another EA connected MMO, by the way - and how other challengers like DMO fall by the roadside, could well be Titan. Elder Scrolls Online is getting a lot of cr*p already, the SWTOR treatment from the permanently unhappy gamers, and everything else seems pretty marginal at best, including ArchAge etc.

Such a great game that Blizzard felt compelled to give out 1 200 000 copies of the game free...

I followed the game a bit, but that was the game Dahlberg wanted to help to build. And no, I wouldn't have wanted to play it either, but I still wished the best for it and the people behind it.

Both. BECAUSE of the effects of server mergers, DESPITE server mergers because the populations of the new merged servers collapse very quickly, if they are ever high at all.

It sold 3.5 million copies. Blizzard has also given out a whopping 1.2 million copies of the game free.

I really like how you are trying to see things in a positive light, but I know enough business jargon to know what "restructuring" means in these circumstances. But keep up the positive vibe - someone has to.

They threw people overboard mainly from the Titan development team as far as I recall.

Just remember how Dahlberg fared after he walked out. His new game lived just weeks after it launched.

I don't think that the game will have 1.3 million active, paying subscriptions after the free month for 50s. I really, really wish it would, but the actual number must be much, much smaller when looking at the server status. I would have wished this game to go from strength to strength, but that's not how things are going.

They won't be replacing all of the people they have layed-off, only a very small group of them. Vigil was recruiting people for Dark Millennium Online - a game I was really looking forward to - until the moment THQ announced that the game would be gutted to a single-player. So then, still hiring doesn't sadly really mean anything.

All too true.

Diablos are simple games for simple people. Could be Blizzard's new mantra: "Simple games for simple people."

No MMO has ever been saved as a result of server mergers. Server mergers just lead to a downward spiral, bad publicity, more people leaving the game and more server mergers.

Laying off 25 percent of the work-force when you were still recruiting people few months ago is giving up; we are not talking about a few "unneeded" people here and there. SWTOR is the main reason why EA bought BW in the first place. And when EA gives up on SWTOR it gives up on BW. Think of that, all of you who complained that BW should have done a Mass Effect MMO. There will never be one now. No KOTOR 3. No Dragon Age MMO.