Rumours

[TheSeventhJedi]

EA released that SWTOR saw a 30% subscriber increase with KotFE.

 

Of course it did - there was an expansion with a shiny trailer and huge promises. Wonder what the sub numbers are like now that we know what KotFE really is?

[Max_Killjoy]

Of course it did - there was an expansion with a shiny trailer and huge promises. Wonder what the sub numbers are like now that we know what KotFE really is?

 

Whenever a "backer" of KotFE and/or the 4.0 changes touted the sub numbers, I said "wait a few months for the shine to wear off" or whatever.

 

Now I find myself thinking that the doomsayers are also over-reacting.

[IanArgent]

Whenever a "backer" of KotFE and/or the 4.0 changes touted the sub numbers, I said "wait a few months for the shine to wear off" or whatever.

 

Now I find myself thinking that the doomsayers are also over-reacting.

 

EA touted the sub numbers in a recent financial report; without giving hard numbers. Take that any way you like.

[Pagy]

EA touted the sub numbers in a recent financial report; without giving hard numbers. Take that any way you like.

that's what a quarterly report is supposed to do. provide honest but positively spun results devoid of context.

 

you can see "sub year over year gone up" but add some context then many questions surface.

are these net new sub adds? how do net adds compare to SoR sales? etc etc. i mean we dont know these things.

[IanArgent]

that's what a quarterly report is supposed to do. provide honest but positively spun results devoid of context.

 

you can see "sub year over year gone up" but add some context then many questions surface.

are these net new sub adds? how do net adds compare to SoR sales? etc etc. i mean we dont know these things.

 

They mentioned it; so it must have been important that they mention it.

[Pagy]

They mentioned it; so it must have been important that they mention it.

um, its up to the reader to decide if it's important or not.

[IanArgent]

um, its up to the reader to decide if it's important or not.

 

One of these days I'm going to stop using pronouns. The authors of the report clearly thought that it was important that they include a positive mention of the (then-current) sub numbers in the report. By including that reference, they didn't include "something else." {i]Why[/i] the authors felt it was important, I can't say.

[Pagy]

One of these days I'm going to stop using pronouns. The authors of the report clearly thought that it was important that they include a positive mention of the (then-current) sub numbers in the report. By including that reference, they didn't include "something else." {i]Why[/i] the authors felt it was important, I can't say.

determining relative "importance" without the other variables is meaningless.

[IanArgent]

determining relative "importance" without the other variables is meaningless.

 

We have the most important variable - it's in the report. The authors can't mention everything in the report, there isn't enough time or space. It was important enough, to them, to mention, over other pieces of info that were not mentioned, across all of EA's business lines. What we don't know is why it was importnat; but we do know that it was important.

[Pagy]

We have the most important variable - it's in the report.

you're attributing importance just based on the fact its there? again i ask; what were the alternative metrics or figures that were passed over because i dont seem to have them in front of me.

The authors can't mention everything in the report, there isn't enough time or space. It was important enough, to them, to mention, over other pieces of info that were not mentioned, across all of EA's business lines. What we don't know is why it was importnat; but we do know that it was important.

again, importance should be determined by the reader. the author just needs to put a large favourable number in front of you hoping that you do attribute importance to it.

 

how is this hard to grasp?

[Ouardajason]

hes referring to EA selling out on SWTOR - kinda like how SOE was sold too daybreak

 

Hearing lots of rumours in game that the plug is about to be pulled on the game.

I just wondered if the Devs could give us abit if reassurance it's not.

The rumours stem from

With a talked about bug fix that was due to take place Tuesday not happening with no word from Devs

Credit spammers have halved there prices overnight many see this as they are ITK so to speak

The fact the PTS was pulled early last night

 

Personally i never normally believe all the negative talk.. However if we could just get some reassurance its not gonna happen anytime soon that would be great

[Andryah]

Whenever a "backer" of KotFE and/or the 4.0 changes touted the sub numbers, I said "wait a few months for the shine to wear off" or whatever.

 

Now I find myself thinking that the doomsayers are also over-reacting.

 

Everyone in this debate is pretty much over-reacting.

 

1) rumors are worth the paper they are written on. Such writing usually is presented in rolls that hang on holders on your bathroom wall.

 

2) Even old or mediocre MMOs are quite capable of muddling along and being profitable and have a sizable player base for years and years. Look at DAoC... a hollow shell of it's hey day... still chugging along under the EA MMO label after 14 years. They even recently released a new major patch called New New Frontiers where they overhauled the core of the game (end game realm frontiers). But to listen to the average complaining MMO player... once they don't like an MMO.. it's dead to them and they insist it be dead to everyone.

 

3) ALL MMOs have lovers and haters in their player base. What is more common now days is the opposing sides of discussion have become more inclined to rhetoric and exaggeration in lieu of objective discussion. I think we can take the somewhat lawless nature of social media and it's influence on internet communications in general as the core cause of this shift in behaviors.

 

Someday this MMO will shutter. It is not likely to happen prior to EAs SW IP license with Disney expires. That would be 7 or 8 years from now. Generally speaking, it is easy to tune your investment to match revenue for an MMO. The real killer is IP licensing in most cases, or in the case of NCsoft... intolerance for low growth game properties.

Edited March 18, 2016 by Andryah

[divinecynic]

lol a sub was required for kotfe; can you not understand context?

 

Indeed which was good business. The fact remains that it meant a large influx in cash at least in the short term. That's the point, cash more than anything keeps mmos going. Did you not understand the context of my post?

 

Some will go or have gone as the shine wears off. With the new pvp maps some olders players will come back. If new ops drop more may come back as well.

 

Basically it comes down to this, the game is making a lot of money from everything reliable seen beyond rumors. Why would EA ditch a good source of money? SWTOR likely has a few years left in it. EA may do something different but the game could easily be very profitable for that long.

 

Let's be clear about one thing. I am not saying all is well with SWTOR. I am just saying the game is obviously making money and therefore not going anywhere anytime soon.

Edited March 18, 2016 by divinecynic

[Pagy]

Indeed which was good business.

i dont have enough information to make that conclusion.

The fact remains that it meant a large influx in cash at least in the short term. That's the point, cash more than anything keeps mmos going. Did you not understand the context of my post?

they merely traded selling an expansion for $15 with requiring a sub and hoping they stay subbed. i can't say whether this was a good thing or not without comparing to SoR sales and sub churn following SoR. Even that isn't a great comparison without know sub before SoR vs subs before kotfe. suffice to say, none of us know anything about the model's success or not.

Basically it comes down to this, the game is making a lot of money from everything reliable seen beyond rumors. Why would EA ditch a good source of money? SWTOR likely has a few years left in it. EA may do something different but the game could easily be very profitable for that long.

i can think of about a billion variable that would go into deciding to keep the game supported or not. this is beyond any of us.

Let's be clear about one thing. I am not saying all is well with SWTOR. I am just saying the game is obviously making money and therefore not going anywhere anytime soon.

only thing that's obvious here is you making sweeping generalized conclusions based off scarce information.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

EA released that SWTOR saw a 30% subscriber increase with KotFE.

.

 

30% jump? Where was that figure and what was that measured against? I know they mentioned the highest level in 3 years but I never read the 30% part.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

Don't see the game going away anytime soon. "Content" is cheap to produce, if the underlying system is sound (whic it's not right now). But fixing the system is a matter of time more than money (and one where money does a poor job of substituting for time - see "They Mythical Man Month") - time for the programmers to grok the bugs and fix them instead of painting over.

 

If they cancel Eternal Championship, then I'll start to worry, just a little.

 

I feel the system is reaching it's pinnacle - every little improvement ( say graphically ) seems to take a huge toll on low end users performance ( who meet the advertised specs ) - go read the help forum for proof of this.

 

I don't see the system improved without a complete overhaul and that's just not going to happen.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

We have the most important variable - it's in the report. The authors can't mention everything in the report, there isn't enough time or space. It was important enough, to them, to mention, over other pieces of info that were not mentioned, across all of EA's business lines. What we don't know is why it was importnat; but we do know that it was important.

 

It's in the same section that talks about overall digital ( I believe the term was ) revenue has being down though across the company.

 

Take that as you will but they didn't mention revenue for this game being up anywhere which to me is the most important factor and somewhat telling in of itself.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

i dont have enough information to make that conclusion.

they merely traded selling an expansion for $15 with requiring a sub and hoping they stay subbed. i can't say whether this was a good thing or not without comparing to SoR sales and sub churn following SoR. Even that isn't a great comparison without know sub before SoR vs subs before kotfe. suffice to say, none of us know anything about the model's success or not.

i can think of about a billion variable that would go into deciding to keep the game supported or not. this is beyond any of us.

only thing that's obvious here is you making sweeping generalized conclusions based off scarce information.

 

I tihnk if you go back a page ro two to where a poster mentioned the revenue for this game being a driving factor for "service and other revenue" yet if you read the entire part it never mentioned revenue being up at all for this game yet it did mention another game - madden - being up as an offseting factor to a couple of other games ( battlefield 4 ) being down in this category.

 

What do we now know? SWToR along with Fifa contributed the most to service revenue which was down over last year. We know subs were up over 3 years.

 

What can we conclude though? That revenue for this game wasn't up at all but remained static over the previous year ( hence no mention of it being up or down anywhere whilst other games did get that statistic if it was the case ). This leads us to believe the increase in subs only really just offset the loss of having a paid subscription ... remember that paid subscription though launched in december 14 and would have continued to get purchases well into january - the kotfe shine had well worn off by december.

 

That tends to tell me the subscriber content vs paid content experiment failed initially else you would think 3 months vs 1 month year on year would yield a nice boost to revenue - not a static line.

 

What we don't know is how things are tracking now and based on the seeming increase in 'doom n gloom' threads over any other period I can remember coupled with server decline ... this model is not working as intended.

[Daex]

Revenue is not profit. Although thank you for the link.

 

It's like, someone always tries to nit pick these things. Of course it's not the same thing in general, but with greatly reduced development team (evident to everybody), outsourced/reduced support team (shortly after launch I was able to talk to Level 2 engineer over the phone, now I needed to wait for couple of days for e-mail response instead; additionally, when I did talk to a person, it was always the same person recently, while before in 3 separate calls in 1 hour, there were 3 different people). So, for any intent and purpose, based on the above, we can consider that the game is in fact, turning a profit for the company right now (actually the time period specified in the report) because from what I'm seeing, it easily looks profitable with range of subscribers between 20 and 50k.

 

The only question in my mind is, whether it is profitable ENOUGH, because if they can divert the (limited) resources into something MORE profitable, they will do it. I still think there is no reason to worry. People without experience in development would be surprised how long can you support this stuff in limp mode with a couple of developers and a support agent. Obviously not the case here, as they are releasing new content, but how many people do you think work full-time on this game? It's not a secret that most of the team is now working on other projects.

 

And just briefly in regards to the previous post, I let the document there to speak for itself. Drawing any conclusions about the fact that TOTAL revenue is increases or reduced in comparison to previous years is risky and probably flawed, as it has very little to do with SWTOR. We can't know the exact numbers as they are not displayed, but don't believe for a second that fact that SWTOR is mentioned there, means that it takes a huge portion of the ~450 million number. They have plenty of other online services going, and for the 3 month period, I believe when they mention SWTOR there, they mean from 30 to maximum of 100 million coming from the game. They also shut down a number of F2P games last year such as Battlefield Heroes, other battlefield F2P, and some others that I can't remember. I would say that probably shutting those games down had bigger impact on year to year comparison, than some subscription swings.

[akdonkey]

I don't have the link to the Forbes story but this is the second most profitable MMO to date behind WOW of coarse. So why do people think the plug is getting pulled all the time?

[divinecynic]

30% jump? Where was that figure and what was that measured against? I know they mentioned the highest level in 3 years but I never read the 30% part.

 

"Finally with regards to subscriptions, we launched a major expansion for Star Wars: The Old Republic on Tuesday. Subscribers are up 33% since the expansion was announced, to their highest level since February 2014. We’re

optimistic about its continued performance, in terms of both subscribers and free-to-play, in the run up to the first new Star Wars movie in a decade."

 

This from http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ERTS/1103210826x0x857614/E1F22ABE-39BF-4E30-B15D-9CD066F41334/Q2_FY16_Prepared_Comments.pdf

 

How many stayed? How many left? How much did they spend on the cartel market? I am not sure. However EA would be silly to ditch it now. Changes need to happen after Season 1 is done to be sure. Hell I think we are seeing the possible beginning of them now. How long has it been since we got pvp maps?

 

As I said before SWTOR is alive and well and making money. It is not going anywhere anytime soon.

[divinecynic]

What we don't know is how things are tracking now and based on the seeming increase in 'doom n gloom' threads over any other period I can remember coupled with server decline ... this model is not working as intended.

 

Well I am not sure the forums are reflecting what is actually going on in the game honestly. Did it ever? Is SWTOR in a ton of trouble? Depends honestly. Let's see come this fall. I think what comes after KotFE season 1 is going to decide a lot. If they drop new ops along with the new pvp maps, it could do much for the longevity of the game.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

"Finally with regards to subscriptions, we launched a major expansion for Star Wars: The Old Republic on Tuesday. Subscribers are up 33% since the expansion was announced, to their highest level since February 2014. We’re

optimistic about its continued performance, in terms of both subscribers and free-to-play, in the run up to the first new Star Wars movie in a decade."

 

This from http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ERTS/1103210826x0x857614/E1F22ABE-39BF-4E30-B15D-9CD066F41334/Q2_FY16_Prepared_Comments.pdf

 

How many stayed? How many left? How much did they spend on the cartel market? I am not sure. However EA would be silly to ditch it now. Changes need to happen after Season 1 is done to be sure. Hell I think we are seeing the possible beginning of them now. How long has it been since we got pvp maps?

 

As I said before SWTOR is alive and well and making money. It is not going anywhere anytime soon.

 

Ahh since it was announced. Only 33% .. seems low on the gamble of not having people pay for the expansion as was done with previous years and supports my view that revenue hasn't really increased at all and very well might be in a worse situation this year. Arbiter saber might have helped that though

 

As to the future ... I dunno ... change will certainly help but what I do know is this model is not sustainable, it will kill the game sooner rather than later so lets hope for changes.

[Volthammer]

Rumors can never be taken too seriously. Just look at the commitment the Devs and publisher have to this game if you want reassurance...

 

This exactly. Doom and gloom rumors and forum posts are ubiquitous in all MMO's. Actually since MMO's began back in, what, 2000? Very late 90's? Besides, a company like Bio/EA isn't going to announce openly any genuine concerns about the game. Even merely mentioning a concern, whether based on legitimate problems or not, about the product would leave very long lasting negative impressions in the minds of many, many players and potential players that could profoundly affect the game's actual future. That's how the public is.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

Doom and gloom rumors and forum posts are ubiquitous in all MMO's. Actually since MMO's began back in, what, 2000? Very late 90's?.

 

Since WoW was released as it was the first MMO.