Yea, Well, The Old Republic Will Fail When…

You may not be aware of it, but here at MMO Fallout I have a very lax policy of commenting. I don’t require you register, or for that matter even fill out your username or email address (a good portion of the comments here are entirely anonymous). There are well over five hundred comments spanning 1,100 articles, and in the two and a half years since MMO Fallout was funded, I think I’ve had to delete one legitimate (not a spam bot) comment but only because the person was using a large amount of racial epithets. Still, there are a lot more comments about this website off site than on site.

I think it has something to do with not wanting to risk looking like a fool on the off chance that your premise is inaccurate and you are unable to edit the message, which is also why I receive more emails than I do comments. With The Old Republic, I managed to hit a nerve with a few people every time I referenced the game this past year as clearly “the biggest release of 2011.” First I was told to wait until I’d played the game. Truth be told, I started playing The Old Republic around the time the Electronics Entertainment Expo was still running, so I already had experience. Then the closed beta weekends started and those same people told me to wait until open beta for the game to flop.

Naturally, closed beta turned to head start and I was told to wait until launch, that was when the game would flop. Forget that, by this point, The Old Republic had already been referred to as the best selling preorder for Electronic Arts. Finally the game launched, and this is where those same people started sending me actual “proof,” in the form of empty guild channels. I was told to wait until the dreaded first month passed, and that is when I would see subscriber numbers drop off and the server mergers start.

Well now Bioware has stated that The Old Republic has sold two million copies and retained 1.7 million subscribers, most of whom are past the first month. No doubt the next step will be waiting for the initial three and six month subscribers to drop off, and then we’ll play it by expansion. Will The Old Republic grow or decline? I don’t know, I don’t claim to foresee Bioware’s production schedule to ensure players at end-game don’t get bored too quickly.

In other words: I’ve already talked about how Guild Wars 2 will be insanely profitable and popular, and some of the fans shouldn’t take good news for The Old Republic as a personal assault on their game of choice.