Step back and look at the potential cost to EA/BW for them giving the free 30 days

Obviously none of us know how many current subs were active as of yesterday at 12PM CT and will make the cutoff by the 22nd get in on the promo. How many would you guess? 300k? 500k? more? less?

The point is even if you take a very low number like say 200k and multiply that by $14.99, you come up with just shy of $3 Million. Big company or not, that's a large chunk of cash. The fact that they're willing to essentially write that off in a month (or later due to some people paying multiple months), is a big deal.

To each of us it's not large but certainly a large impact on their bottom line and it would be nice to think of it when people scoff at what they consider a paltry offer...

So you're saying that they're so desperate to retain subs that they're gambling a month's worth of revenue on their patch being enough to keep them around?

Where exactly did I say that? I'm saying they realized they needed to make up for what they possibly considered some poor issues and offered something back as an apology or a 'thank you for sticking with us'. There are a LOT of companies out there that would have done nothing and simply moved along as if it was just a typical bump in the road...

People say EA is cheap and all about money. This offer clearly says otherwise me thinks.

agreed.

Or it could mean that they have far exceeded the number of subs they ever expected to retain or needed to retain.

or they are worried about GW2 coming which has no sub fees at all... and also worried people will realise that Subs are not needed, that people shouldnt have to pay for bugs to be fixed etc.. that should just be fixed.
and you should only pay for expansions

Well, let's use the last official numbers that were posted by BioWare.

1,700,000 subscribers.
x
$14.99
--------------------------
$25,483,000

Now obviously not all 1.7 million subscribers qualify for the 30 day trial, this is just the highest last verified number. Though with the new qualification of just having Legacy Level 6 I imagine a large portion of the population will get it. Now taking that number in comparison to the total development cost of this game, which was $200,000,000 it is just under 13%, which is fairly significant.

Now to plays Devil's Advocate,

Why did they do this? Is it because investors are getting a little antsy at this point and are concerned? So this is a way of keeping subscriber numbers high through the release of 1.2? Was this done because Ranked PvP was not released with 1.2 and it was known far enough in advance, and the ramifications would be a spike in subscription loss?

I personally think it was a mix of all those things. Shortly after the release of the game EA stock dropped by double digits, investors stating they had concerns about the potential of SWTOR. We also know that the PvP community is very upset over 1.2 in general, not even including the issue with Ranked not being released.

Another factor to consider in the numbers are the people that aren't going to even use their free month, because they have left or are leaving........

All in all it is a gamble for BioWare/EA at the end, but I think they will be safe. They have enough resources to ride it through until they recover from any potentially negative effects of doing this. Though it does make one wonder, free weekend and buddy pass, now this? Who is giving who heat in the company to push these things so close to release? It, on some levels, gives the impressions that the game isn't performing like anticipated and they are trying to drive numbers.

In my book its a desperate attempt to keep people playing and not canceling their sub, which will probably work in the short term. Yeah it may cost them quite a number of millions but it is better than people leaving by the masses and the game dieing, which could so easily happen given the amount of blunders Bioware are making with patches and implementations.

And yet....people still complain.
Thank you for proving my original thought, that even if Bioware changed the qualifier to include MORE people...
Someone is still going to cry about it.
Can't please people these days...it's impossible.

EA is a business, and the point is to make money. No single move they do is made with the intention of losing money. I'm sure they have a lot to gain with it, so they did it.

If TOR ever starts losing them money, they will close it on the spot. They are not here to make us happy, or make us favors, they are here to make money. And as long as TOR is running, it will make them money.