The sky isn't falling. A numbers based view.

[Stenrik]

^^^ Good point, but do we know the extensiveness of the restructuring? Also don't forget the hefty license they pay to Lucasarts. I'm pretty sure that doesn't scale down with players. Edited October 26, 2012 by Stenrik

[Tim-ONeil]

To say this game has less than 500k would be nothing except an opinion that is based on your overall feelings of the game. That doesn't make it accurate in anyway at all and this thread exists to stop those arguments in their tracks.

 

This thread is not about vibe, it's about numbers. Right now we can estimate the subs given EA's information and next week we'll have a new statement for them. Curb your negative feelings on this, because they have no useful application when discussing real data.

 

Server populations are stable now and really if they had the server merges back in Feb rather than June they would have had a much higher retention rate. Having 1.3 million people at that point and spreading them out over 100+ servers instanced not only by faction but planets, heroic area, etc feeds chicken little syndrome and leads to lemmings style subscriber loss. If your massive player base can't actually see each other they don't believe they are there.

 

About profitability, that is directly controlled by EA. They control everything that has to do with their own expenses and can maintain whatever profit percentage they desire by adjusting their workforce as we've seen.

 

To further put this into perspective. Star Trek Online has only 3 developers actively working on that game. SWG for the last few years of it's life only had 3 developers actively working on the game. This allows them to remain profitable.

 

Layoffs occurred in SWTOR not for any nefarious reason but to keep the dev team tied to the revenue generated. Should F2P take off the dev team would be expanded to reflect that again.

 

Also even at the low end SWTOR as the #2 MMO with this payment structure would make at the low end of the EA subscription estimates 90 million annually gross income. If it's closer to the 1 million mark, then that becomes 180 million gross.

 

While that is an AWESOME amount of revenue for anything not named WoW, you can see why EA would want to downplay it's importance at their shareholder meetings. All of their major console releases, Madden, Battlefield, etc generate a much larger percentage of their overall company revenue and they have a diverse portfolio. Investors that panicked back in April over this game missed the bigger picture.

 

That doesn't mean that they will walk away from that revenue and put it into maintenance mode. Given the framework here and the Star Wars IP there is a lot of growth available judging by how the other games that have gone to a FTP model have increased their numbers.

 

Next time someone says oh this game is doomed you can confidently ignore them based on real data.

Edited October 26, 2012 by Tim-ONeil

[Goretzu]

You don't think bringing that number down has been a priority then, with all the lay-offs and reconstructions they've made?

 

I don't think any of the games mentioned, including SWTOR, need 500.000 subs anymore.

 

It's impossible to say, but the 500,000 figure was certainly bandied about after some of the layoffs, in fact it was last mentioned quite recently IIRC.

 

Certainly they have a lot less hardware now too, but equally that doesn't mean costs for that would be slashed yet.

 

To say this game has less than 500k would be nothing except an opinion that is based on your overall feelings of the game. That doesn't make it accurate in anyway at all and this thread exists to stop those arguments in their tracks.

 

 

Whilst it's possible that server pops are showing 1,000,000 subscribers playing almost not at all, it's far more likely they are showing something much closer to 500,000 playing a lot more.

 

It's unlikely that SWTOR would have much below 500,000 at this point (although remember SWTOR has always retained more subs than other MMORPGs have for a similar amount of server activitiy), but equally it is very possible.

 

Also they'd have used language suggesting "near 1,000,000" to their investors if indeed that had been true, the whole "between 500,000 and 1M" thing only really works as PR if the numbers were much closer to 500,000 even then.

 

So an estimate of ~500,000 subs is probably as realistic as you are going to get without offical numbers (and they won't give offical accurate numbers IMO unless F2P pushes active accounts well over the 1m mark, which it very well might, but that will be next year now).

Edited October 26, 2012 by Goretzu

[Tim-ONeil]

Next week we will have a new earnings statement from EA with information about SWTOR's subscription numbers. I'll reserve my judgement of feelings based statements that it's has to be closer to 500k type thinking until then. You may be right of course but again we are going on what information is available.

 

Keep in mind as well that most privately held companies that do not have to file an SEC statement do not disclose their subscription numbers except when they want to talk about a recent growth to try to draw more people in. As a collective group people do not have the ability to view the big picture and allow their own feelings to muddle what should be a black and white financial picture of the game's health relative to it's own genre peers.

 

It's amazing how quickly everyone is willing to abandon this game as a financial nightmare and there's a serious lesson being learned here in the venture capital area on the funding of future MMO's. When the number #2 MMO's players busy convincing themselves that there's no way they will get an expansion ever and the game will be shut down by next year you realize how out of touch the average person is when it comes to business as well as how much public perception is fueled by groupthink.

[Rayla_Felana]

I think people are missing out that they also stated that they still have 'well above' 500,000 and later stated that their sub numbers are 'much larger' than 500k.

[Laris_Rai]

Yeah it's quite obvious by just logging in. Not to mention there's this thing I like to use common sense. Not everyone needs things spoon fed to them.

 

In other words, you're guessing.

[Wraiven]

NOOOOO but SWG was the greatest game evar!!! TOR needs to be turned into SWG2 NAO!!!!

 

/sarcasm off

 

Why do people chose to comment on things they know nothing about?

 

You realize SWG is a game that went through many changes, every change was worse than the change before it, which pushed the countless fans away from the game over a period of time. People left the game in a mass exodus, while the few refused to admit that Sony was screwing up would tell them, "See ya, can I haz ur stuffs?!?!" and do them the same way the players do the quitters here. Until there were only 30K left.

 

SWG was the "greatest game evar" until sony change the mechanics of the game all together, and dumbed it down for the nine year olds that "want to be jedi nao!!!"

 

So your comment up there shows just how little you really understand and know about SWG.

Edited October 26, 2012 by Wraiven

[Tim-ONeil]

Why do people chose to comment on things they know nothing about?

 

You realize SWG is a game that went through many changes, every change was worse than the change before it, which pushed the countless fans away from the game over a period of time. People left the game in a mass exodus, while the few refused to admit that Sony was screwing up would tell them, "See ya, can I haz ur stuffs?!?!" and do them the same way the players do the quitters here. Until there were only 30K left.

 

SWG was the "greatest game evar" until sony change the mechanics of the game all together, and dumbed it down for the nine year olds that "want to be jedi nao!!!"

 

So your comment up there shows just how little you really understand and know about SWG.

 

Except that you can actually play SWG as it was in it's hayday right now if you want. I had a Pre-CU full template Jedi and I loved that game more than anything else when I played it.

 

I played it in August for 3 days on the EMU. My nostalgia factor was high, I loved seeing the old skill tree, but it doesn't stand on it's own as a 'good' game compared to what we are offered on the market today in my own opinion.

 

Anyone that is interested in seeing what they think of that game is also able to do so.

 

But lets try to stay on topic about SWTOR's numbers compared to the competition. It is telling however that the games that people cry for the loudest in terms of design were never successful in their own right.

[Kalfear]

The big difference is all of those MMORPG, except SWTOR, don't need 500,000 subs to make a profit (assuming that figure is still correct).

 

And SWTOR is currently much closer to 500,000 than 1,000,000 it could even be slightly below it.

 

Gor give it up man

 

These fanbois will never admit the truth about the shape this game in

 

He says no spin and in his first lines hes spin fantasy like mad!

 

TOR, even though I enjoy it (and yes fanbois, one can enjoy something but still see its shortcomings), is a market failure. plain and simple.

 

But your always going to have your paid supporters, err I mean passionate fanbois , who just refuse to admit the truth of the topic.

 

TOR should be millions strong and growing at this stage

Its not and its going f2p in under a year to push up profits

Many of the game designs are absolutely stupid beyond beleif and if the original devs had bothered to do any real research into the genre they would have seen these errors before repeating them.

 

Some blame EA

Some blame Mythic

Personally I think this game had to big a budget that the exes got comfortable lifing the high life (so to speak) rather then worrying about finances and what not that most MMORPGs have to deal with.

The devs simply got lazy

 

I still hold out hope that the new blood coming in actually plays the game and experiences the games short comings first hand and stop relying on "metrics".

 

But by the numbers this title failed to meet its market share and failed to capture a majority of subscribers imaginations to hold them long term.

 

And anyone disagreeing with those truths really not worth argueing with

They simply the internet version of the kid in the school yard saying "I know you are but what am I' over and over and over!

 

The sky not falling

It already fell hard

now is time to rebuild from the rubble

 

This game sold 2.1 million copies and failed to maintain even 30% of those subs from all reports.

 

Thats really the only important number out there!

All those other games dont matter squat

2.1 million people bought this game knowing it had a monthly sub and the game failed to keep them entertained longer then 2 months for the most part.

 

Thats not the genres fault

Thats the designers fault

 

But what ever, the OP and that other one will continue to heap senseless accolades on TOR. Never fully managing to grasp the entire story being played out.

[Tim-ONeil]

There's no accolades here. I'm not a paid fanboy. I don't care what you think of me if you can't view this from a non bias perspective.

 

This is a numbers based analysis and your view is an extremely bias one bringing up design issues. I'm not disputing that in anyway at all. My post doesn't touch design issues because that's not something that can be quantified. Only subscriptions as an absolute can be quantified. The reason for sub loss is complex guessing at it based on your feelings isn't reliable. If the market says that 30-40% is an expected rate of retention currently for new games, then that is the information from which we judge the game. Not made up numbers in our heads.

 

The bottom line is the expectations were unrealistic. Once we have data that proves this the next step is to set a more logical expectation for the game going forward AND for new games being released so you don't fall into the same trap.

 

Scientific theory actually works like this:

 

Hypothesis development

Predictions from the hypothesis

Experiments

Evaluation and improvement

Confirmation

 

Your hypothesis is that the game should have many many millions of subs. This has been proven to be not the case in reality and examining the market was unlikely to ever be the case.

 

Now that we know that it's time to reanalyze the hypothesis based on the data. We don't claim the hypothesis (million and millions of subs) is infallible if we are being objective.

 

In fact here's a completely uneducated guess I made on the growth of the game prior to launch because I had no idea what I was doing. I thought comparing the game only to WoW made sense (it doesn't). I was completely wrong, admit it and now did the market research I should have before.

 

http://followtheforce.net/swtor-info/blog-docking-bay94/28-expectations-for-star-wars-the-old-republic.html

 

I understand your passion for the game in wanting it to have bucked the trend of all of the other MMO's. I shared this same passion. Now I am realizing after viewing the data that this was an unrealistic expectation. While I'm personally disappointed by that it doesn't mean the game is a 'failure'. It means it couldn't live up to my expectations that were not based on scientific research into the genre model.

 

If you can't accept this I understand. Based on the attitudes on the forum many people can't accept it either.

Edited October 26, 2012 by Tim-ONeil

[NRVNQSR]

yup, ignore the stupid trolls, enjoy our game and move along =P

[Elminster_cs]

You forgot GW2... i think SWTRo is actually the 3rd in place

[Tim-ONeil]

You forgot GW2... i think SWTRo is actually the 3rd in place

 

I specifically stated in the post that completely Free to play models without a subscription component (Aion and GW2) are not a part of this comparison. They are akin to buying a console game because there is no ongoing monetary commitment to the those games while receiving full benefits of playing.

 

Subscriptions themselves are what we base SWTOR on and are exactly the opposite model of GW2. SWTOR is given flak because they are losing subscribers. If we based SWTOR on the same criteria as GW2 then the total box sales would be the final word there and even that wouldn't be a good comparison since you are buying into different payment models.

Edited October 26, 2012 by Tim-ONeil

[chaosmadness]

You forgot GW2... i think SWTRo is actually the 3rd in place

 

GW2 its a f2p MMO dude, not a subs MMO model.

Edited October 26, 2012 by chaosmadness

[Etapi]

I think people are missing out that they also stated that they still have 'well above' 500,000 and later stated that their sub numbers are 'much larger' than 500k.

 

I had to reply to your post just to read it. Seriously, consider a different color font.

[_tegrof]

"Despite being careful and doing the necessary research, MMOData.net cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here as it is based on various sources which could be incomplete, inaccurate or otherwise unreliable. Furthermore, all estimates are the opinion of MMOData.net and should be treated as such."

 

If they won't release real hard numbers, they're hiding them for a reason.

[SpearlikeAtom]

"Despite being careful and doing the necessary research, MMOData.net cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here as it is based on various sources which could be incomplete, inaccurate or otherwise unreliable. Furthermore, all estimates are the opinion of MMOData.net and should be treated as such."

 

If they won't release real hard numbers, they're hiding them for a reason.

 

Not necessarily, just because you ask them doesn't mean they have to. Perhaps it's none of your business how much they make.

[phill-fry]

This was a good read and I will be following this thread for more information

[Nemmar]

If that's accurate, then the WoW decline has begun as I predicted before Pandaria release.

 

And guess what... the bubble effect of the expansion is wearing out.

 

Checking xfire.com WoW had 60k hours of play a couple of weeks ago and has now droped to 30k. GW2 is now down to 18k.

Give it a couple more months and we will see what dumbing down your game so 5 year olds can play them really ammounts to.

 

Oddly enough, SWTOR seems to be the only one not declining at the moment. I am predicting a rise from the ashes with F2P and the makeb mini-expansion.

 

"Despite being careful and doing the necessary research, MMOData.net cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here as it is based on various sources which could be incomplete, inaccurate or otherwise unreliable. Furthermore, all estimates are the opinion of MMOData.net and should be treated as such."

 

If they won't release real hard numbers, they're hiding them for a reason.

 

Ah... this kind of post again...

 

Newsflash: Website with studies on information > information pulled out of rear end.

Every study is just that, it does not represent exact numbers but something close. The official company is the only one that has the exact numbers, and obviously they arent in a sharing mood cause it affects their stock market shares.

Edited October 26, 2012 by Nemmar

[Goretzu]

.

 

The bottom line is the expectations were unrealistic. Once we have data that proves this the next step is to set a more logical expectation for the game going forward AND for new games being released so you don't fall into the same trap.

 

Scientific theory actually works like this:

 

Hypothesis development

Predictions from the hypothesis

Experiments

Evaluation and improvement

Confirmation

 

Your hypothesis is that the game should have many many millions of subs. This has been proven to be not the case in reality and examining the market was unlikely to ever be the case.

 

 

Sorry, but that's just plain disingenuous pseudo-science.

 

There's no way you can empirically measure "expectations" or indeed anything to do with "how well" something should or should not have done.

 

There is nothing scientific about this thread, it's just statistics and whilst they can be used to help see the wood for the trees, they are not in and of themselves "scientific", any more than sticking a drink in a Erlenmeyer Flask embues it with "science".

 

 

There's simply too many variables to draw anything but they most general conclusions about anything in this respect.

 

And nothing in this thread precludes another "WoW" (although nothing really supports it either).

 

 

 

 

All you can say with what you present is that SWTOR has average to very poor retention (the variablity of the last data point for SWTOR his HUGE) for a MMORPG launched in the last 5 years..... which isn't really saying a lot.

 

It's all just guesstimates.

Edited October 26, 2012 by Goretzu

[HoloTweed]

Why do people chose to comment on things they know nothing about?

 

You realize SWG is a game that went through many changes, every change was worse than the change before it, which pushed the countless fans away from the game over a period of time. People left the game in a mass exodus, while the few refused to admit that Sony was screwing up would tell them, "See ya, can I haz ur stuffs?!?!" and do them the same way the players do the quitters here. Until there were only 30K left.

 

SWG was the "greatest game evar" until sony change the mechanics of the game all together, and dumbed it down for the nine year olds that "want to be jedi nao!!!"

 

So your comment up there shows just how little you really understand and know about SWG.

 

Sadly, your comments show you don't understand things any better.

 

SWG was NOT doing great until changes. It was in steady freefall, bleeding subscribers who didn't like the game for a multitude of reasons (although it was quoted that the most cited reason was "doesn't feel like Star Wars" - I took that same exit poll). That's the reason FOR the changes! Changes weren't made just to see how much they could screw around with the game - it only FELT that way.

 

People have a very nostalgic view of SWG but in all honesty, most didn't REALLY like it for many different reasons while it was open (and that sentiment got WORSE, as the changes alienated those still there instead of bringing others back) and THAT was the reason it was sunsetted...

[Tim-ONeil]

Sorry, but that's just plain disingenuous pseudo-science.

 

There's no way you can empirically measure "expectations" or indeed anything to do with "how well" something should or should not have done.

 

There is nothing scientific about this thread, it's just statistics and whilst they can be used to help see the wood for the trees, they are not in and of themselves "scientific", any more than sticking a drink in a Erlenmeyer Flask embues it with "science".

 

There's simply too many variables to draw anything but they most general conclusions about anything in this respect.

 

I will disagree with you completely however on the scientific nature of the thread. Numbers and statistical analysis is science itself. In MMO's we can debate game theory all we want, the only things that is consistent is the market reaction to the games measured by the subscription numbers.

 

Expectations are assumptions (hypotheses) without factual basis until they are tested. We can apply methodology to determine why we were so off base with these assumptions. That is science.

 

And nothing in this thread precludes another "WoW" (although nothing really supports it either).

 

All you can say with what you present is that SWTOR has average to very poor retention (the variablity of the last data point for SWTOR his HUGE) for a MMORPG launched in the last 5 years..... which isn't really saying a lot.

 

Thank you for making my point without realizing you just did. /tiphat

 

This is exactly the point. After reviewing all the data assuming this game or any other game at all could be the next WoW is a very bad bet to make. Many of us made it and are still holding the game to that standard, which is a flawed approach.

 

Now the very poor retention comment is hyperbole. It is anywhere from average to above average based on the info they gave us.

Edited October 26, 2012 by Tim-ONeil

[Tim-ONeil]

We will have a new statement from EA on the SWTOR subscription numbers next week. At that point I will completely reassess again based on those numbers.

[Goretzu]

I will disagree with you completely however on the scientific nature of the thread. Numbers and statistical analysis is science itself.

 

No, it is simply a tool. Without relevent emprical data (which just says what I said it said), it is meaningless.

 

 

Expectations are assumptions (hypotheses) without factual basis until they are tested. We can apply methodology to determine why we were so off base with these assumptions. That is science.

 

No, it is hokum dressed up with pseudo-science and dab of make-up. You can't emprically test expectations.

 

What exactly is the unit of "expectation" or "assumption" for that matter?

 

 

Thank you for making my point without realizing you just did. /tiphat

 

This is exactly the point. After reviewing all the data assuming this game or any other game at all could be the next WoW is a very bad bet to make. Many of us made it and are still holding the game to that standard, which is a flawed approach.

 

Unless your point was the one I made (which was basically all this thread shows in regards to WoWs success is nothing) then I don't know what you mean.

 

Many many people said before SWTOR that trying to make WoW again wasn't ever likely to equal it, there's nothing new or amazing about that.

 

Innovation might do that, but the problem with corporate driven "creativity" is it moves towards the least risk, which is exactly why all we have in the games industry at the present are copies and copies of copies which diminish in sales with each generation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Guessimates are fine, but to pretend we can do anything other than that is just plain silly.

Edited October 26, 2012 by Goretzu

[Andryah]

The big difference is all of those MMORPG, except SWTOR, don't need 500,000 subs to make a profit (assuming that figure is still correct).

 

It's not correct at all. See my earlier post. Kay thanx.

Edited October 26, 2012 by Andryah