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

Pvp was designed by the same people that did warhammer. Now lets take a look at where warhammer is now. If you dont know what i mean just look down because its DEAD. WHY would you hire a team to design your pvp from a game that basically flopped? Who knows!

This is because probably you never played Warhammer.

WAR was a game with an HUGE potential.

The RVR (Realm VS Realm) was Very nice, and till today one of the best PVP experience ever.

The reason why WAR failed was others (for sure NOT the PVP system)

My estimate in 3 months is about 1mil subs. Where we still define subs as people still with gametime to play, not the amount of people that pay a monthly fee. In one year I estimate 300k subs. I'm doing this analys, not to bash the game, but cause I find it fun and it will be interesting to see how much wrong or right I have. This is all guesses of course, but I try to use numbers and graphs I find to help me predict, unofficial and official.

Numbers:
Subs: 1.7mil, - This number is the most exact one by sure. EA want to show as high as number as possible here.
Sold copies: 2mil+, - This one is the most vague number cause it doesn't say how many they sold. only that it's more than 2mil. To show as high a retention rate as possible they will want to keep this number as close to the subs number as possible, but still show that the game sold very well.

Sold copies as of Jan 31th are:
Official: 2mil+ and almost 40% of the sales are through Origin.
Inofficial: www.vgachartz.com(yes they arent 100% exact, but they often have a very close number) says 2.1mil physical copies sold as of Jan 28th. Add almost 40% of total copies being sold through origin and we are looking at maybe even 2.5-3mil total copies sold.

Total: I'm estimating they have sold roughly 2.5-2.6mil copies digital+physical.

We also know that more than half of the 1.7mil subs are people who paid for an extra month. This number is also very vague since it could be from ~860k paying subs to ~1.69mil. But if it was 2/3 paying I'm sure they would have bragged about it so I would guess it's between 50-65%.

Retention rate: It's too early to estimate any retention rate. Polls I've seen seem to indicate about 65-70% first month. I don't think any retention rates should be guessed until at least 3 month. Many people are forced to buy gametime cards of 60d if they don't wanna add a credit card, just to play their 30 free days. Also there are still quite a large amount of copies sold every week, about 100k per week or so now I'm guessing from numbers I've seen. Although it's dropped fast and is still dropping. I would guess 70-75% first month though, but dropping faster and faster.

All inofficial graphs that can be used to guess trends in this game point towards a steady drop in population. Yes I'm talking about everyone's favorite http://www.xfire.com/games/swtor/Sta...e_Old_Republic aswell as http://www.torstatus.net/shards/us/trends and http://www.mmo-junkies.net/statistics/

I'm not gonna pull some numbers from those cause it's impossible to get any exact number. But to show trends, at least X-fire, has worked remarkedly well for MMO games. The other's back it up by indicating the same thing. As well as people feeling alot of servers becoming more and more empty, wanting merges.

This is not to try and say this game is a catastrophic failure. In fact, I think it will make a good bit of money for EA/Bioware. I also think they will be able to have a 100k-200k population for the next coming years and those that stick around will see alot of new content and a healthy game. I know EA said 400k subs to break even, but I'm sure that was just the average for first year which they should manage without a problem and with this many copies sold they have made a good bit of money already.

Reason for my numbers is that I feel that this game is a niche game. Competition will also be very fierce during 2012. Also that they rushed this game out in hopes that first impression for most would only be level 1-49 speaks against em. The leveling was just too fast to keep the low endgame quality hidden long enough. I got a good 300 hours of fun playtime from this game and that isn't bad, but I'm also one that play MMOs for years so as a MMO game to me it failed. I think it will keep alot of casuals playing, but not enough of those are willing to stay around for the long run when the game has a monthly fee and they only play a few hours per week.

1. Youre looking at charts about subs and retention?
2. 300 hours of playtime?
3. Leveling too fast?

Wow, i can bet you havent left the house in a very long time.

If you would stop and read some things you would see they are about to release a major content patch concerning PvP mostly but also some PvE in March, and every month after will get a major content patch

My rough estimate is 2.5M Active Subscribers
What's yours?

1. I look at charts to predict trends yes. Not to get any numbers though.
2. Combining my alts I think it was about 10d /played, that's not 300h but I don't remember exact.
3. Don't think I level too fast since I only had one char to 50.

And I rather not leave my apartment for long if I have a fun game to play.

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