SWTOR and the EA stock plummet

Actually, if we look at EA's chart in this article, we see that the decline started in OCTOBER 2011, two months before SWTOR went live. And furthermore, the October '11 peak reached the same level as an earlier peak that occurred in June 2011. Stock analysts would say that's evidence of EA testing it's upper-price limit and failing to break through.

I think this price decline has little to do with SWTOR. The game's financials are still in line with their original market-share predictions. Even the "400k lost subscribers" figure doesn't surprise me. Consider the drawing power of the Star Wars brand. I figured there would be a large number of new customers sampling the game, and even sampling their first MMO, simply because of the Star Wars IP, and that a significant percentage of that initial crowd would balk at the thought of subscribing to the game beyond their first month. Even on the pre-launch forums, I saw many posts from people enraged that SWTOR wasn't a single-player "KOTOR-3" -- people who asserted that they would probably just play through the storylines as they would a single-player KOTOR sequel, and not resubscribe.

We also should bear in mind that EA is an entertainment company, and entertainment companies tend to take big hits in recessions.

That said, the continued strength of Activision/Blizzard is interesting. It seems they were bouyed by two big Blizzard hits, back-to-back: Starcraft-2, and Diablo-3.

I'd look at EA's broader activity. There's got to be bigger reasons for the slide that started in October than one MMO. I'd suspect EA's been taking hits on multiple fronts. I'd also look for other strong performances from other product lines within Activision/Blizzard.

Call of Duty in particular is drawing Battlefield and Medal of Honor (any FPS fan of EA) players like crazy, setting record after record, while EA is stagnating or failing to produce any comparable product.

EA is back to its old habits and it shows.

Actually, ATVI has been flat as a pancake (spiked last fall to over $14 and then has steadily meandered back down into the $11s). Seems to be an industry-wide problem. No video game companies are really doing well at all. IMHO, blame the free-to-play model and the "Zyngafication" of the gaming landscape. Activision Blizzard held up better than EA because ATVI pays a dividend (a dinky one, but it's competitive with a 10-Year Treasury). Plus, ATVI has better prospects with Titan, WoW's huge sub base, Mists of Pandaria, the annual iteration of COD, etc..

I followed EA's last quarterly report VERY carefully and with great interest. I'm one of those cautious retail investors with tons of capital on the sidelines hiding in cash (plus laddered intermediate-term actively managed taxable and municipal bonds). In a normal economy, I would jump at the chance to be in EA at $12-13 per common share. But in June 2012, with China slowing down, Spanish bond yields spiking, Eurozone recession, Eurozone collapse (?), a contentious election that will inevitably leave half of the nation dissatisfied and disgusted, and a fiscal cliff looming, no, thank you. Unless your name is Apple, I don't want to own your consumer discretionary stock.

EA needs to hope and pray that their next conference call does not include one question from a determined analyst: "How many paid subscriptions do you currently have for The Old Republic?" Pressing EA's management on this point could be very bad for the stock price. Any hemming, hawing, or dissembling will (IMO) result in an immediate annihilation of the stock price (see what happened recently with David Einhorn and Herbalife for a relevant example). Make no mistake. The analysts blamed SWTOR for that last quarter. Fair or not, this game was singled out on CNBC for criticism. If EA's stock price enters single-digit midget territory due to more bad SWTOR press, expect management to react in a way that is not favorable to the long-term health of this game. Which would be a shame. I think this game has improved a lot since launch, and I hope EA gives it a chance to develop into something great.

HAHAHAHA..... no way... SWTOR is gone, noone is coming back. 1.2 was meant to the be the patch which was going to bring back all the initial TOR release players (I am one), and it didn't bring back any, they still lost numbers.

TOR is tarnished forever with the clunky gameplay, patches breaking more things than fixing, no end content, list goes on and on.

GW2 won't be a WoW killer, it will be a TOR killer.

http://consumerist.com/2012/04/congr...-for-2012.html

probably didn't help the stock

I don't think the controversy over ME3, along with the disappointing sales of Syndicate and Kingdoms of Amalur did them any favors either.

I wish I had done that. Oh well...live and learn. Which is why I have not bought ME3 yet. I hate movies with bad or sucky endings, let alone a video game series like ME, which the others rocked. Same with DA2, glad i never bought that one after reading all the reviews. It is sad, but BioWare for me is in a downward spiral.

So to sum it up, based on the financial and labor investment this game was supposed to rival if not surpass Blizzard / Activision / WoW. Yet it is settling for an as of yet undifined benchmark of success, located somewhere along the lines of DAOC, Everquest or alike.

Makes perfect sense to me. The game is modeled and designed as an outdated WoW clone but the devs seem to intentionally and repeatedly alienate the portion of their playerbase that came from there, and it is a LARGE portion.

Standard current MMORPG features include but are not limited to:

Proper ways to find / participate in group / community play - its in the works, but too late and may be too little by now.
Lack of proper ingame feedback - crappy notepad style log output just doesnt cut it in todays gaming world.
UI - its about half baked, went from horrid to tolerable, still needs a lot of work.
Too many bugs, especially on the already lower faction causing further faction imbalance.
Performance problems even on highest end machines where customers have other games installed which do not suffer them. - again in the works, but some of it should just plainly not have been released (ilum anyone?)

List goes on and on. On par, this product can not equal or surpass WoW as are the investor expectations of it. Yes there are a bunch of arguments, it took em 8 years, its in the distant distant future being worked on, we dont want WoW kiddies, blah blah blah, yea, go ahead and explain that to the shareholders that they have to wait 8 years because it took blizz that long.

For us players the game is still enjoyable for what it is, but if investment goes out from under it, there will be less content and features released / worked on, everything will be released on annual instead of quaterly or monthly basis, etc. At those rates many of us will continue to leave at a growing pace.

I agree i think SWTOR was failed from the start. They sent out a game that was very unfinished and very sub par compared to what everyone expected. Of course your going to have alfan boysanboys and such defend this game and say it is epic and so on but no matter how hard you try many SW fans disagree with how this game plays out. They put an unfinished game out to some of the hardest critiques in the industry i would say because star wars was such a big success and still is today but this game does it no justice at all.

Bring on the hate but just remember they thought this game was going to be ground breaking and P2P for a long time as we all see though, the truth comes out since its failing at an alarming rate and F2P is right around the corner.

A great deal of what you just said is simply a matter of opinion. Personally, I don't think it's failing, and I certainly don't think it's "doomed".

I'm a bit incredulous that people consider it so "unfinished" when it released. True, there was a ton of things that could have been improved, but that's the way it is with every game in existence. It was reasonably well polished compared to past MMOs that have released, and they've fixed most of the major issues by now.

As for the success of the game itself, as other people have stated, what I see is a huge amount of Star Wars fans jumped on the bandwagon who had neither played an MMO before nor wanted to bother paying monthly for the game. The decline of subscribers was simply all those players realizing that the game wasn't what they wanted. Personally I think the game is close to its stable point of subscribers, and if you visit Scorpienne's thread here http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=484899, you'll find that if you look at the numbers, the amount of average logins are slowly starting to inch upward again.

And that's my personal opinion.