John Riccitiello - "Realistically, TOR's a solid success."

Set scale to go all the way from December to now. It is a LOT more than 25% - actually more like 40%-60%. Only AP is better because game is still only three months there and on only three servers.

Try doubling 400k and your closer to the real loses, there been deceptions happening and it good that people noticing the spins now, wait till free months run out and active 6month subs, you will then see the real number is below 400k.

Torstatus.net shows server loads using a non-linear, relative scale (1 = light, 2 = standard, 3= heavy, 4 = very heavy, 5 = full). You can use torstatus.net to show trends over time and you can use it to compare servers. You cannot use the numbers on torstatus.net to estimate the drop in population. For example, if the average score changes from 2 to 1 (a numerical drop of 50%), you have no idea if this represent a population loss of 10%, 25%, 50%, or some other number.

Can you show us your math please, because try as I might, I cannot reproduce your calculations.

The common quoted figures (from various news sources) for SWTOR is $100 million to develop.

The numbrers said sub declined from 1.7 million to 1.4 million, so we'll assume there are 1.7 million box sales at $50, and each subscriber paid for one month at $15/month.

65 * 1.7 million = $110.5 millon. Yes not all box sale is pure profit (though digital sales are pure profit) and so on, but if someone asks you to invest $100 million and you'll *only* get an extra $10 million from your base investment back after one month I'd consider this a very good deal. It might not be an impressive ROI (the game took 6 years to develop) but then I'm calculating assuming the game is basically going to die after one month too.


Now of course in Wall Street a game is judged on expectations. The figures say EA lost like $600 million/year so maybe they thought SWTOR is going to be a cash cow kind of like how WoW's $1 billion/year revenue covers for other game's development costs + flops. Well SWTOR probably isn't going to be the cash cow and no SWTOR developer will be swimming in money anytime soon. So yes SWTOR might be far below expectations in this respect. But if you assume SWTOR eventually turns a revenue of $200 million by the end of the year, and the game took 6 years in development, that's a return of 12% per year which is a pretty darn good investment.

To use an analogy, SWTOR would be a guy in the family making a decent income, but his brother took all the money he made and waste it on gambling, and overall the family is in bad shape, and people are saying, 'well if the productive guy in the family made ten times more money they'd be able to afford to waste 90% of it on gambling and still have a money bin to swim in."

Every serious MMORPG plans to take on WoW. The guys who go out and say, "We come in peace WoW, please don't hurt us" are pretty much already dead. WoW only has around 5 million guys paying $15/month (Asian guys pay way less), so if your game pulls 1 million+ subscribers at $15/month you're definitely going to get WoW"s attention whether you want it or not so you better get ready to fight WoW. Whether you'll be successful or not, who knows, but nobody should start a major MMORPG planning for failure.

And honestly WoW's hurting too if you look at their numbers. It seems like all the new MMORPGs do is mutually wipe each other out. People are leaving SWTOR but people are leaving WOW too.

Sorry MR Crow but again you are trying to change the subject. If you do not believe that continual drop in server load indicates that the active subscriptions are less than the quoted 1.3 million then please provide your argument as to why.

All else is an increasingly desperate attempted to distract from the discussion. What’s wrong, don’t you have any logical argument to back your opinion that Wayshuba’s observation that the dropping server load that is backed by the data he posted might bring the quoted sub numbers into doubt?

This game is not dying, it is dead.