Back in March 2010, I wrote about my concerns with Star Wars: The Old Republic, primarily built around the expectation by EA Games that the game would require one million subscribers in order to “break even.” In fact, in the very-pre-release hype, EA went as far as saying that they could not only see one million subscribers, but that the number could go as high as two million. Naturally, I expressed my concern that The Old Republic could wind up like Tabula Rasa (I would have made a comparison to All Points Bulletin, but the game had neither launched or crashed at that point), shutting down after about a year.
Perhaps in response to the news that investors are lacking faith in EA Games’ ability to maintain its MMOs (Warhammer and All Points Bulletin being two examples), EA responded this week by reeling back on their one million subscriber comment. In fact, they went as far as rolling down numbers to claim that The Old Republic could be profitable off of only five hundred thousand subscribers, although EA would prefer to see the insanely profitable number of one million and beyond.
So is EA CFO Scott Brown doing damage control? Very likely, as both comments came up during conference calls attended by Gamasutra. Claiming one million to “break even” is a recipe for disaster, and in a world where EA can’t risk losing any more investors to their MMOs, the fate of The Old Republic may sit on Scott Brown not exaggerating in conference calls from now on.
MMO Fallout 