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What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
sooner or later someone will be the smart guy and "suggest" to revamp the game during a relaunch window a la Final Fantasy. wait for it
then they'll call it "Star Wars - A Galaxy Reborn"
SWTOR is dead- long live SWAGR
Sure as long as you toss out the parting words of the last EA CEO who stated as he was walking out the door that the fuged numbers of SWTOR got him fired...the same man that came clean about how they hid actual information from investors by combining the revenue of SWTOR with 2 other games to keep the companies stock from falling father and that his replacement should come clean about how the F2P conversion isn't doing half what he said it was doing for the same reason.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
Good op post. And one that "rings true". SWTOR was developing new content; then "recurring" subs came in below expectations; then the game went into what do we do mode and months later - August sounds about right - the questions will have been what can we do with the budget / staff / existing material that will have the biggest impact.
As for numbers: silly comment throwing out 3rd most played etc. - given how few games fit the caveats it could be as well.
Sub based - can't count the F2P players because otherwise you have to include the like of LoL and Runescape etc. Not to mention most of SoE's and AreaNet's current crop of games. GW2 isn't sub based either. Probably rules out LotR and AoC as well.
Western - which technically SWTOR isn't of course even though its closed the Australasian servers - but that exclude Lineage etc etc
Also has to be fantasy / fiction - otherwise games like EA's BF3 have a bigger "premium subscription" base and a host of others.
Has to be PC based. Which gets rid of all those pesky social games and console stuff (all the co-op stuff etc.).
Of substance I think the western element of Eve and WoW may be the only games that meet the bill.
I may be missing some so please post if I have missed some sub based / western / PC / fantasy or fiction mmos.
However - assuming I haven't - it basically means that SWTOR is 3rd in what is essentially a three horse race. Bigger than UO, AC, DAoC and - whilst it remains open - WAR which EA will know about. And - presumably - bigger than niche games like Darkness Falls and Mortal Online. Not exactly something to write home and brag about.
Got any links to back this up?
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
Pretty sure he meant 3rd confirmed played MMO, seeing as no other MMOs release active player numbers except the 3 companies he mentioned. Also, just because they say SWTOR has 500k subs, doesnt mean it only has 500k players (obvilusly has a lot more F2Pers). Quoting more than the 500k though is just speculation, the same with GW2, FFXIV, and every other MMO thats not WoW, EVE, or SWTOR.
Its not hard to release active player numbers for non subscription based games, Blizz did it with Diablo 3 (3 million unique logins per month, over a year after its release).
I'm pretty sure if EA lied on their financial earnings report, 1 person losing their job wouldnt have been the only reprocussion, and it also would have been in every videogame publication instead of us "finding out about it" from some random person on MMORPG.com.
Can we put you in the category 'bitter SWTOR-vet' in a year or two?
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
they can do an nge of tor in the right way by bring back 32+ professions, unlockable jedi/sith, doing away with the whole story nonsense that got them into this mess in the first place, open up the planets and bring back housing.
who am i kidding that won't happen they should really just get sony to restart swg or hand the emu guys a blank check and team.
yep, and those numbers basically spell the future for the Company
so..if you were an employee, or shareholder, would you like that future to be bright(and maybe illegal)?
or gloomy(legal)?
even , if the law get on to them, how hard is it to gather evidence of foul play?
we need better Laws on this subject, and better enforcement
this is a multi billon $$ Company
if you want to believe a paper, they wrote, to get more Money..go ahead
but im old enough, to have seen this behavior before
So now would be a good time to enlighten us all with exact number of SWTOR subs.
As afar as OP, i suspect its not far from truth, as funny but as sad at the same time. people need to realize SWTOR operates on close to skeleton crew since F2P.
You dont have to lie just do a bit of "creative accounting"
They never ever posted any financial numbers on SWTOR. And they regularly post numbers for their successful games.
Most probably lot of SWTORs debts were just written off to hide the real numbers.
What do you think saying "SWTORs revenue has doubled" means? Doubled from what? From when? If they had 1$ revenue, having 2$ now is not awesome if game costs you 1 000 000$ monthly to operate.
And those who hate a video game (that is just a sad concept) will do "creative copy/pasting" they will post sections of a quote that benefit them and leave out the rest . Do you have any links, facts, or evidence to back up your claim that the are committing a crime by doing "creative accounting" just to save a game? Do you have any links, facts or evidence that they have written off their debts to Swtor? Any links, facts evidence their profit was $2 or it's cost 1000000 a month to operate.
Feel free to post any links, facts or evidence to back up any of your conspiracy theories.
It is marketing. Everything that EA say officially is marketing written by financial public relations professionals. And SWTOR hasn't gone out of its way to release sub numbers either.
If I read what you say correctly you are assuming that SWTOR today has 500k subs ... and F2P players on top.
Other threads have discussions about sub numbers but if SWTOR has 500k subs then last November, before the game went F2P, it must have had 670k subs. Why? Because in August EA said they lost 25% of their pre-F2P sub numbers. And clearly it didn't have 670k subs last November!
Yes EA said it had "just under 500k" subs in May. However anyone who was going to buy Makeb was likely to have paid $15 to become a subscriber for a month for which they got a $10 discount, game credits and preferred player status if they didn't already have it.
The "just under 500k" number is probably a very good indication of how many players SWTOR had back in May.
Everyone i talk to is by default a moron so the only valid opinion is mine.joking
all we have to back it up is..reality
the mass firings of swtor crew
the ceo of EA got fired too..would they do that, if he did a good job?
the devs said, that game would break even at 500k subs
a year after launching one of the most expensive games ever, they were at that point
if you can make that into a positive story, you should Work in Hollywood
I think its so clear that TOR is on it's last legs.
The swtor crew is just gone what's it down to 4 people? it takes them forever to get any content into the game and keep in mind all of the 'new' content is just cut content left over from launch. ea's ceo is gone and the new one that will take over isn't going to look kindly on tor. as for the numbers its been shown that tor may have 75k if that at this point.
really the big thing i hear all the time from the players is why can't tor be more like swg. i think its clear that disney is going to take a hard look and decide to bring swg back.
Multiple rumors a few months back, were saying that EA/BW is or was trying to dump TOR so they could get out of the licensing fees (which are still reportedly very high, the same as at launch), after Disney took over.
Not sure if anything came of it, but it certainly doesn't say anything good about how TOR is doing.
tor just isn't doing anywhere near what they want it to be its clear they want it to have wow numbers and its never going to happen. as i have pointed out time after time the wow based theme park game is dying and people are screaming for more sandbox titles like swg.
look around at the titles that have come out this year none of them are doing well yet sandbox games like eve are growing.
I would be ecstatic if SWOTR recovered and we actually get real expansion with 4-5 new planets, new class stories, new proper companion, new "old" companion quests, theres so many loose ends, so many characters we met on our heros journey that can make comeback because....so much potential. I would pay proper expansion price for that.
But the way its going its never going to happen, and fanbois with their "SWTOR is doing awesome, everything is awesome", burying their heads in sand, like EA/BW, aint helping.
OTOH i will never pay for gimmicks like Makeb or space WZ, new raids aka "recolored gear grind" (yawn)....
SWTORs engine is probably not suitable for "proper MMO" (lets face it, hundreds of players make game unplayable, been questing on alderaan last few days and cap on Alderaan seem to be 40 players/instance) but what IS cut out to be is cinematics, story telling and coop playing. It can really excel at that.
Its backwards really, they ditch thing what makes SWTOR good, stand out in the crowd, and push what makes SWTOR bad and what many games already do better, and, until they fix their engine (read never as it stands now) where SWTOR cant compete.
I don't think Disney cares if TOR stays open or not, they are getting their money, by way of the licensing fee.
It is EA/BW that is taking it the tailpipe, for being on the hook for that fee.
I also think, that unlike other companies that primarily run MMOs, EA might be more tempted to "cut bait" with TOR, for the simple reason that it is not worth the trouble for the return (they make most of their money on the sports game franchises), or the constant reminder of its "non-success".
Who knows what deal they made with Disney, maybe its now lumped under their general SW license, or maybe they said it failed and will pay almost to nothing for it (according to results ;P)
EA did want to tap in MMO market quite agressively, after few failures i guess they tought they scored a jackpot with BW and SWTOR, but now, i think they cooled off from whole MMO thingy and we wont see any EA MMO anytime soon
Hmm I never played SWG and I thought TOR was garbage, but maybe I'm an outlier. hmmm lets see 50% of 1.7M = 850K Did SWG ever even get that many people? guess a lot of them were outliers too huh.
EDIT a perception of a crappy game is still a perception of a crappy game regardless of some mythical SWG rage that may or may not be floating around the interwebs. The lions share of complaints I saw, both during beta and later externally, were the engine (omg did people B&Moan about the engine) poor CS; lack of content once Storyline was done; poor pvp implementation; slow bug squashing(particularly Ops and Illum). None of that had anything to do with SWG.