SWTOR and the EA stock plummet

Point being they won't go F2P until they found out what their flat line number is.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...paign=us-daily



EA losing 50% of it's stock value since the SWTOR launch? Ouch. What implications does this have for everybody's favorite MMO in space (besides Eve)?

Stopped reading when you said Minecraft. Grindiest grind fest with absolutely no instructions for newbies, and you're calling it not overwhelmingly complicated or difficult.

Also, Call of Duty is something wannabe gamers play while they chug Mountain Dew Code Red and screaming racist and sexist remarks at strangers on Xbox Live. It uses the most negatively stereotypical marketing there is.

Minecraft is not complicated. You place blocks and build things, the creatures shoot arrows at you and blow up, it's not overwhelming.

What is wrong with grinds?

People know what they like and if they like something, they will do it over and over again.

The whole 'remove grinds' argument is elitist dribble. These players they rush through all the content than throw their arms up in the air and go 'Now what?'. Well, you can do it again and if you don't want to do it again chances are you didn't enjoy it the first time.

The elitists they enjoy that rush that they get from proving they are better than everyone else, they don't enjoy hard, bang your head on the wall content. You'd have to be a sadist to enjoy some of the content they put in games these days. Diablo 3 Inferno Mode, who enjoys getting 1 shot from creatures they can't even see.

Just look at WoW, 14 million subscribers at the end of the Wrath of the Lich King with its faceroll Heriocs and marginally harder Raids. Here comes Cataclysm with its significantly increased difficulty to Heriocs and near impossible Raids and there goes half the player base overnight.

I'm not saying nerf the difficulty in the game, by all means do not. Leave the harder stuff for players that want the harder stuff, but right now the easiest difficulty in the game is Story Mode and that's too hard for a vast majority of the computer gaming player base.

You need a faceroll difficulty where people could get away with bashing 2 keys on a keyboard and ignoring fight mechanics, if you were to put that into the game I guarantee you subs would increase dramatically.

The stock market likes the prospect of growth way more than the reality of predictable, stagnant sales. EA's stock ran up a lot on the prospect of 2 - 2.5 million subs netting up to $450 million a year in new, recurring revenue. The margins on those digital subscriptions would have been fantastic.

They ran the stock up to $8 billion in market cap on the prospect of that and their other digital initiatives being huge hits, and in reality the performance of both has been, well, boring. So the stock market would rather go speculate on another frenzied growth story until that bursts too.

The only reason the speculative frenzy might matter to us is if the EA brass decided to slash and burn SWTOR development and hype something else to please investors and save their own jobs - and unfortunately, the huge ginormous layoffs from last month told me - along with EA CEO's comments about how unimportant SWTOR is compared to EA sports - that maybe that's what they're up to. But I'd love to be wrong.