NOW = 1.7 Million Active Subscribers | 3 Months from now = Guess What

Very few SWG fans cam here to begin with most of the are playing the EMU and are quite happy with that, The biggest demographic SWTOR has is disenchanted casual players from WoW who are sick of Raid or Die followed by KOTOR CRPG fans. What people fail to understand is the amount of current subscribers who are not happy is small.

I get that many think that with all the crying on the forums that isn't true; but if you take the most viewed thread and you divide by the number of subscribers you would see that in the grand scheme of things hardly anyone bothers with the forums. The complaints are relativity small the buzz for this game is still huge; that doesn't translate to the mass exodus that the hate machine has been waiting for, they were wrong when they predicted 3/4 sub loss at the first month they are wrong now.

But time will tell who is right.

One of the threads on the front page has almost 12000 unique views. More people browse the forums than people give credit. Some have had upward of 25k. That's not a small number, considering many people have friends, who have friends, who will tell friends, and if that friend leaves, their friend may leave, so on so forth. One must be aware of a snowball effect.

Wiser to just be cautious than dismissive.

Im not calling for the death of TOR but seems to me the server pops dropping, not growing during prime time from what Ive seen!

Ive seen 1 heavy server in the last 3 weeks and I routinely log in around 7 pm est every day!

So Im going to guess at the end of 3 months they will be around 1.1-1.3 million subscribers.

Which is still reasonable to be honest.

Typically MMORPGs that release strong have a drop for the following 6-9 months and then once the short term players weeded out they grow or fail after that on word of mouth.

Even the much vaulted WOW lost subs for the first 9 months after release before turning it around and growing their playerbase (and they had the ultra blind battlenet fanbois to prop them up with).

Long as TOR doesnt lose more then 50% of its first 2 month subs (pre launch and 1 st 1.5 month sales) its doing ok.

If it starts dropping 70%-80% of its subs by end of 3rd month like SWG did, then its in trouble.

TOR long term success will live and die on its updates and first expansion.

Fun game but simply to easy and quick to hold initial player sales much past the 6 month mark at the latest.

The updates and promise of first expansion is going to have to bring in the long term sales as TOR was designed (wrongly IMO) as a short term game.

But Im sure the haters will say Im wrong and predict much harsher failure and the fanbois will claim Im wrong and say TOR is greatest thing since slice bread. That seems to be the trend on these forums.

PS: If EA/Bioware starts offering free trials with in the 3 month period (really with in the 24 month period), expect RIFT type results.

Free trials 3 months after release are a death sentance to a MMORPG and send a clear message that this game can not hold its players long term.

May as well offer up Lifetime subs while they at it.

Seriously? After the literally dozens of posts explaining this and giving proof with the q&a session after the earnings call, there are still people that perpetuate this bs?

http://www.darthhater.com/articles/s...-earnings-call

Read!

Actually, alot of us SWG fans are already here. Most of us left SWG cause of the mismanagement, not cause we hated SW. This is a second chance for us to live in the galaxy we always loved. SWG was an awesome game for casual players, so is SWTOR.

Yes, all the others from KOTOR, Anti-WOW and such are here as well.

Don't think we SWG old timers simply died off.

You could have the President of EA come to their house and personally tell them the numbers were from sometime in January and they would still maintain the numbers were from prior to Dec 31. Can't convince everybody that reality is actually reality.

I'd tell you you're wrong and explain why but i'm not going to bother, short story shorter it's impossible to keep everyone happy and there's a large crowd comming from sandbox mmo's
Me personally? I'm going to stick around for a while

Oh for... you people just don't give up, do you?

If you attended the conference call, or read any of the reports or transcripts from the call, you know that is a bald-faced lie. The financials are as of EA's Q3. The numbers reported about sales and subscriptions were current as of the day of the report (Feb 1, or as near to that date as they could gather numbers) and the projected budgets were about Q4 spending (since Dec. 31, including the last 30 days and the next 60). All of those things are routinely covered as part of informing investors about a publicly traded company's earnings.

In case you are actually ignorant, rather than maliciously lying in hopes that people don't check on your facts, here are some of the key points from "those numbers":


From the Q&A:

Q: When we will start to see the effect of the 1.7 million subscribers? What’s the impact of on-going R&D for providing the new content?
A: It's still very early. It is hard to extrapolate where those 1.7 million subscribers lead or mean, but it’s a great start. We have huge plans. Lots of end-game content and even expansion packs. It will involve R&D post launch and we took care of some of it pre-launch. It’s a little early to identify what those all will specifically be and what our goals will be. as mentioned, we will be increasing marketing support.

Q: Are these 1.7 subscribers paying?
A: Active subscribers means anyone paying or in their trial period. Most of those 1.7m are paying at this point.

******

Even if you try to ignore the "to date", "since December", and "currently" terms, it's pretty clear that they are talking about subscriptions numbers from the day of the call, or from a few days prior, if "most of the 1.7m are paying at this point." None of them would be paying as of Dec. 31st, as everyone would still be in their trial period. There are other financial articles that quote John Riccitiello as saying that the numbers were 1.7M subscribers and growing (though I haven't been able to find the original interview or comment where he said that, so I'll say that's unverified for now).

If you're really that desperate to try to prove that the game is going to fail - I'd suggest following the rest of your peers and starting to argue that the numbers are about to tank for any of XYZ reasons. Insisting that the numbers are old, rather than "current" or "to date" at the point of the conference call is only demonstrating ignorance, obstinacy, or an inability to read and comprehend English properly.



Quotes are from the EA prepared comments, available here:
http://files.shareholder.com/downloa...112_1251pm.pdf

Q&A from the conference call are transcribed by Darth Hater (who attended the session live, to transcribe it for us). They did all the work to pull together the relevant points... I'm just quoting them to stop the rampant nonsense claims by desperate naysayers.

Darth Hater's summary (with more details) is available here:
http://www.darthhater.com/articles/s...-earnings-call

There's also a transcription of the Q&A available here:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3339...ipt?part=qanda

Wait what? What does that "most" mean? I want this game to do well, that word choice concerns me.

The actual word he used was "majority" which is kinda self-explanatory, but what he was saying was that the majority are past their free month and actually paying for the game.