EA shareholders meeting: over/under 300k subs?

I bought 100 shares back when EA stock was in the 10s, I might just do that.

I say around 1mill, but it doesn't really matter mmorpg have been stale for years already. I"m actually looking forward to single players games more than multilayer games. The same is true of fps games.

Then they had better not use the term "subscriptions" when revealing any info on the total number of sub figures.
I would not have any issue with them counting in the time card users as those are still paying to play which is the same the ones with subscriptions are. To add the free to play ones tho in with the subs and time cards, is flat out deception. And if I was a stockholer, I would call them out on it.

Fleets are packed; the starting areas and all the planets have 60-100 people on steady since the transfers... I don't see the numbers going down a bunch since last report. I would not be surprised if they went up either.

Investors don't see it this way.

At $15 per month, 400K subscriptions is $6,000,000 in revenue. At $60 per title, that is equivalent to selling 100,000 copies of a game a month. Assuming it takes 6 months to develop a game, with a recurring subscription model you would have sold 600,000 units of games at 400,000 subscriptions.

Realistically the games which rake in the most revenue have development times of over a year. So with 400,000 subscriptions you sold the equivalent of 1,200,000 units of games. Selling 1.2 million units worldwide is a successful game of which many aren't.


The fact that SWTOR bled over 600,000 subscriptions is the reason they're downplaying the importance of SWTOR. But most investors who have any degree of intelligence realizes what was explained above.

Ekhem, You are forgetting that SWTOR was in development for many years and EA invested huge amounts of cash on this projects that they didn't get back yet.
After you ship single player game (and even multiplayer that is not mmo) there are no additional costs for the company or at least they are low (in comparison to mmo project).
With mmo you have to count in that even with layoffs EA still have to pay for developing new content, keeping support and maintaining server infrastructure and its not cheap. You simply need x subscriptions to have any profit otherwise you are generating monthly loss even if there is noticeable income.
AFAIR they said before release they need at least 300 000 paying accounts to have any profit.

They get away with it for one simply reason, bliz do not control the game in china, riot do. bliz say how many paying players do you have and riot go this many, bliz staple that on and go look we have x subscribers. They have been called out on it once in a investor call so the investors could see how many were paying western subscriptions and it was stated as around 4.2 mil, the rest were china and thats was when it was around the 12 mil mark.

Could be netease now btw. used tobe theo9 too.

Not a rip-off unless a sub is a rip-off. If you sub with a credit card, you pay for 30(or more) days up front, and come what may, even if you stop playing, in 30(or what ever time you paid for) days your time is up.

Same with a time card. The good thing with a time card, they can't bill you for it again when you stop playing.

Strange I've seen this posted by many peeps before.

Don't they teach math anymore in the schools?

They sold 2,000,000 boxes for around $50 each. If they only made $1 on each box, that's $2,000,000.

Did the game cost over $2,000,000 to make? Seriously...????????

And any good lawyer could argue that free to play guys are "subscriptions". Now if they said "paid subscriptions" that would be a horse of a different color. Subscriptions for reporting purposes do not = subscriptions, as you want to define it, they = whatever the user wants to define it as.

Always get the attorney's definition of "subscription", if you want to base an argument on that word, standing alone.

Same with "active account". Does it mean an account that is being played at the moment in time? Does it mean an account that can be played today if the users wants to? Does it mean an account that has been played in the current reporting period for the quarterly call? Does it mean an account that is a "paid subscriber" account.

Fun with words.... a game ONLY for attorneys.