I'm not sure why people jump to the conclusion that the issue was SWG and SWTOR were going to crowd each other out.
Raph Koster, the creative director behind SWG, has a pretty great article/postmortem on the game called
Did Star Wars Galaxies Fail? (
https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/04/2...galaxies-fail/)
By Koster's own admission, though the game had decent success over the entire course of its life, a series of errors damaged the game to a point it became unviable:
The game wasn’t doing as badly as people seem to think. It didn’t fail in the market. It did just fine, even by the standards pre-WoW. But there were huge expectations that we didn’t push against, it launched with serious problems, and the team wasn’t really equipped to fix them. This resulted in a series of errors that damaged the game’s ongoing viability, which resulted in more hurried changes...
Plenty of the choices made, or the omissions, were my decision; in that sense, SWG didn’t fail. I failed it.
He was supposed to have a post-mortem at GDC last year, actually, about SWG, but it seems to not have happened due to COVID.
Anyway, to the point:
SWG was old, outdated, relatively unpopular, and had a dwindling playerbase significantly smaller than SWTOR at its lowest point.