If SWTOR lost 70% of its subs.....

They said it themselves, if they had 500k subs they would manage.

Everyone is concerned with numbers, so lets crunch some.

Now these are just rough figures pulled from news reports so bear that in mind.

2 million box sales at $60 each = $120 million (less than actual #'s and only counts basic edition and digital DL others cost more)

1.3 million current sub's @ $15 each x5 months = $97.5 million (this dose not count people who subbed for 1-4 months)

With those rough numbers that comes to $217.5 million.

A reported development cost of $300 million leaves $82.5 million to recoup development costs. Or 11 months with 500k subs. Or 4 months with 1.3 million subs they are currently reporting.

Now these numbers are low and even looking at a 500k sub base if it runs for just over a year they have recouped development costs. So in the world of MMO's they are doing fine. Now some reports suggest that actual development cost were less than reported (in the 150-200 million range) if theses reports are correct then EA/BW have already made back development costs and are making a profit. Financially EA/BW have little to worry about but that does not mean the game is successful. Poor customer service, continual bugs from patches to FIX bugs, Bug's going un-fixed (some from beta), world PVP failure, ranked PVP delay, and many other problems leave the game lacking and i suspect after the next quarter report you'll see even fewer sub's. Most likely not down to 500k but under 1 million.

I guess you never played Warhammer from EA did you?

i did, and it did take them more than a year to put out pitiful content and they even took out some (forts)

I cant even begin to understand how someone doesnt have the thought process to realize that having a game that just barely makes money is not a good thing.

EA would put the game on life support, there would be very little customer service(look at cs now, immagine how bad it would be if the game was a flop).

The dev teams would be gutted, you would be lucky to see a new expansion every couple of years (with no voice work), you may get some new content once a year if ea was charitable enough (hah!)

The writers would be cut and who knows how bad the stories would end up.

This game needs alot of subs and the fact that its run be EA means that it probably needs to be making even more money than any other mmo run by a smaller company that knows how the mmo market is played.

If this game lost that much EA would cut it's resources to this game, and probably half it not more of the developers would be cut, and then run this game on a skeleton crew doing the odd smaller update.

I feel the need to point out that Age of Conan has 8 people playing on 3 servers and is still a game.

That is all.

And if i went outside and took off my tires and doors and removed the engine out of my jeep it would still be a jeep.

I am no MBA nor do I have an PH.D in Math but I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that 1 million disgruntled paying customers is always better than 500K happy paying customers.

7.5 million dollars a month pays for a lot of dev project man hours.

They can just do what they do now and ignore the unhappy customers.

I was so looking forward to this game as I'm a Star Wars IP fanboy. WHen this game released early over Xmas we had about 20 players online at 2am in the morning working through stories/datacrons/PvP etc etc. There was a real buzz ingame. We cleared endgame and enjoyed the rewards....then a little p[rior to 1.2 we started having less log on, a few grumblings with others gone back to previous games like Rift etc. Then 1.2 hit and a downward spiral began until last night when our guild decided to leave the game as too many raiders had stopped playing. To be fair I was rather shocked and disappointed.

I'm no doomsayer that's for sure. Even though I hated the game I refused to even suggest that LOTRO was dead on SWTOR release. All I'm saying is this seems to be a growing trend and I hope that Bioware can turn the tide or Its rep will take (has taken?) a hit between this and ME3.

Thanks for providing at least a few months of entertainment with my favourite IP
Good luck in future.

Adios.