SWTOR and the EA stock plummet

Don't you think laying off a lot of employees and preparing to massively close down servers kind of indicates the subscriber base is declining? They aren't emptying servers with the character transfer program for fun.

I think Bioware has been eyeing F2P for a long time, or atleast designing the game with this in mind. You see how the planets are all separate instances. They could easily charge for additional planets in the future. I'd be willing to pay maybe $20-$25 per planet if Bioware needs the money, either way I'm sure we'll learn more soon.

That wasn't what you asked. We were talking about F2P options and under AoC's F2P system- you pay for dungeons.

So instead they are supposed to pay for the hardware that can support 220+ servers when they can drop that down to a nice amount?

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.

it is what i asked for.

See the original post I was responding to was this


who is saying if the game goes F2P you won't be able to pay $15 a month to enjoy all the content.

Which as I proved is 100% untrue and there isn't a single F2P model that does what he says.

You can - http://www.swgemu.com , never played SWG nor this server to know if its decently done.

Ya people claimed that before the investor call revealing that the subs had dropped 400k in less than two months. MMO's generally do not recover from a drastic subloss. This tends to drive away players who wish to invest time into a game, it also cripples any growth due to bad press / word of mouth.

not entirely true some MMOs end up seeing increases in subs during big content patches such as what happend in AoC and WAR. Both saw large increases after a couple of patches. But what usually happens is the companies just stop making content or the content is so completely bug ridden that people keep leaving. BTW both of the games I mentioned still had many game breaking bugs unlike SWTOR. Yes SWTOR still has bugs but nothing that could even come close to compeating with AoC and WARs bugs.

Bioware has done a good job on adding quality content. If they do end up adding some type of meaningful space combat then that could see an large increase in subs.

So they killed SWG just in time for this game? I never played SWG and the graphics looked horrible from pics I've seen, but that's awfully convenient timing.