The sky isn't falling. A numbers based view.

Accurate data, it's all about accurate numbers:
2.47 million copies sold Tim.

You do realize that they cut way deeper then just letting go of contractors and development staff no longer needed for pre-launch content development right? If not, then please spend some time following the bread crumbs in Linked-in for Bioware staff to see how many people in how many different departments were cut from the workforce. I suggest beginning with the Customer support staff which got decimated...... precisely because there were fewer customers then their launch plan predicted and they materially adjusted their operations plan accordingly, thus reducing the single largest component in the cost (labor).

Read the post please. TUXs I can't compare that with other games that don't have that data available, in that sense it has no context. EA is one of the only publishers that has this type of data available.

If you can bring retail sales numbers for the first year for each of the games listed I will gladly rerun the numbers. Please also have links so we can verify the validity of the numbers.


EDIT: Andryah's post below is also accurate.

Yeah but you ignoring the publicly published numbers stating that they never had more then 1.7 M subs. In other words, 700K box purchase NEVER subscribed. None of us know how many even loaded the game, much less actually played it. Further, it's pretty evident that a lot of KOTOR fans bought the game thinking/wishing they were getting KOTOR3 and proceeded to play it as a single player discardable game. Nobody knows exact numbers or reasons.... but that is beside the point.

The point is, you can only measure and analyze subscriptions, not box sales in the context of this discussion. MMOdata uses the same methodology for all MMOs that are subscription or freemium.

Just look at how many senior devs disappeared as well. Even the company founders quit. All in a matter of a couple months.

I have a new respect for you. All this time I thought you were just a white knight that would turn a pile of crap into gold. Atleast you can see how the sub rate directly effects the support of the game. Thank you

So...you're using false data to prove a point?!

You state a completely false number Tim. No matter what other data you may be able to collect, you're using FALSE data about SWTOR, which makes any analysis you pretend to make, useless.

Really? Are you new to these forums?

Kidding aside, this is a nice write up illustrating why things are not as bad as everyone fears.

Are things going as well as people would have hoped? No, TOR will never be the game many people predicted and/or wanted. (There are a number of reasons for this beyond the expectations, but enumerating those would be getting off topic.) The point here is that there's still enough of a subscriber base left that they can convert to the new model successfully and keep the game going for a good long while, as illustrated by the other MMOs. (Note that I don't say "will succeed", just that it can.)

Good news for those of us who are still enjoying the game.

Despite being careful and doing the necessary research, MMOData.net cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here as it is based on various sources which could be incomplete, inaccurate or otherwise unreliable. Furthermore, all estimates are the opinion of MMOData.net and should be treated as such.

As much as you appear to love to bash SWG, the guy rates his info on SWG as a "C". No official numbers were released on subs for a long time before the closure announcement. Even though we who played could see that 2 servers were heavy, or full much of the day, and that a few more were medium at times.

Touting any numbers from this site as fact is not correct, unless those numbers were released by the mmo company. Else it's only a guess.

Sub numbers are measurable to companies, and we only know what they choose to disclose. If they don't release accurate numbers, then mmo data doesn't really know, nor do we.

SWTOR could only be at 300k, or more/less, for all we know. The only people who really know work at EA, and the rest of us are just guessing.

Actually, he is comparing apples to apples, whereas you want to inject a box sales number into the equation for this game and this game alone... making it suddenly an apples to oranges comparison.

At least be consistent and objective about it TUXs.