Tag: TOR

The Old Republic Free To Play, Subscriptions Plummeted


Normally when I open an article with “to the surprise of absolutely no one,” I am exaggerating slightly. However, the announcement today that The Old Republic is heading to a free to play model should come as a surprise to absolutely no one with an internet connection and a finger on the pulse of Electronic Arts. Later this fall, The Old Republic will make its transition, allowing players to experience everything* that a galaxy far, far away has to offer. Players will have access to all eight classes, the complete story content, but will be limited in warzone and flashpoints, as well as space missions, travel functionality, and extremely limited access to the galactic trade network.

So why is Bioware suddenly choosing free to play? Well as the announcement puts it:

We feel that flexibility and choice in playing our game is important for all current and future players. For that reason, we began the exploration of expanding the game to include a Free-to-Play option.

Also, at the investor call today, Electronic Arts announced that subscription numbers dropped below one million (from the last reported figure of 1.3 million in May) but “well above” half a million. More specific subscription figures were not made available. Bioware heralded The Old Republic back in December as “one of the greatest and most ambitious achievements in video game history.”

(Source: The Old Republic)

The Old Republic: Server Mergers Possible


“Long term we actually have to look at servers as a whole. The nice part about it is we have doubled how many people we can put on each server since launch. The down side is that at launch, because people were upset at the long queues we aired on the side of opening up more space. What that has now done is separated our player-base into a larger group.”

When The Old Republic originally launched, servers were staggered in order to ensure that players evened out over the course of launch. Following launch, Bioware has slowly increased server capacity to allow more people into each server. The combination of increased capacity and post-launch player activity has resulted in a number of servers with a dearth of players, and Bioware is looking into server mergers in the future.

First, however, Bioware will be opting for a server transfer approach, allowing players to freely move about to the server of their desire.

“One of the problems we’re running into right now is kind of a classic MMO problem, which is that our overall population of players has not changed, but our peak concurrent users has changed”

(Source: Now Gamer)

The Old Republic: 1.7 Million Subscribers


Many years ago, I could provide you with hard subscriber facts because companies were actually able to reveal them. Today, thanks to investors and “trade secrets,” we generally have to settle for vague statements of growth, decline, or breaking even. Actually, these days World of Warcraft is one of the few developers left that come straight out and give base number of subscribers, while NCSoft goes into a detailed breakdown on sales figures per title rather than subscriber numbers.

Since plenty of people have called for the imminent death of The Old Republic, Electronic Arts has eased our pain and suffering of needing to know everything by revealing that The Old Republic has sold over two million copies with 1.7 million subscribers (1 million concurrent), or a retention rate of between 80 and 85 percent. Despite the level of vitriol on certain websites, Origin accounted for 40% of those sales.

You can find an interview below at Darth Hater.

(Via: Darth Hater)

The Old Republic Coming To Australia, New Zealand


It’s been a while since anything was said about The Old Republic’s launch in Australia and New Zealand, or for that matter the lack of a launch in either territory. Luckily, Senior Lead Community Manager Stephen Reid announced on the official forums today that Bioware is aiming for a Spring 2012 launch, around March 1st. Granted, a great deal of players have likely already purchased the game and are currently playing on North American servers, but no doubt this announcement will please those who would rather wait.

We can confirm that Star Wars: The Old Republic will be launching in Australia and New Zealand in the spring of 2012.

Right now we are targeting March 1st, but that could change as our number one priority is making sure that customers have a great service to play on.

For those of you who may have already imported the game, we will be investigating solutions to allow you to continue to play on a local server once they come online in March.

(Source: The Old Republic Forums)

The Old Republic Breaks EA Record For Preorders


That image is getting old. This is an odd piece of news, Electronic Arts did its Quarter 1 financial call for the fiscal year ending in June. The Old Republic did not go on sale until a few days ago, likely leading many of you to ask: How is this being included in their last quarter’s report? Right in the title, man:

Star Wars: The Old Republic Breaks EA Record For Pre-Orders

Despite this being in the header, there is no other mention of sales, likely because of the sales being part of the current quarter. During the conference call, they did confirm that the team is ready for whatever sales the players throw at them:

2:29: Question on capacity management in SWTOR? EB: We’re in good shape to do that, we have the ability to scale for multiple millions of users. We’re looking at stuff coming in as far as marketing and pre-order promotion. We have a lot of capacity to do that.

In the words of the Gman, we’ll see about that.

Bioware: No, TOR Is Not A Sandbox


Star Wars: The Old Republic is not a sandbox title. Let me say that again for emphasis: The Old Republic, developed by EA/Mythic/Bioware, is not. a. sandbox title. That is a very simple recipe of “this is not Star Wars Galaxies 2.” I don’t know why Bioware needs to reiterate this on a constant basis, but once again the usual troop of Galaxies vets have come in to make demands that the developers never promised and only they were expecting to begin with.

Although granted, we had this same conversation with Clone Wars Adventures, where I had to point out that the game is for children. Over on the Old Republic forums, Georg Zoeller posted in a thread asking for sandbox elements, to clarify once again that TOR is not a sandbox game.

There will certainly be out-of-combat player activities and activities that promote social interaction in the game, but you will not be able to take a job as a moisture farmer on Tatooine and simulate the life of such an individual in our game.

Zoeller states that concepts like player built housing are not completely off the table, just low priority. As far as MMO terms go, you can pick up your tickets at the booth, because TOR is about as theme-park as it gets.

In short: Uncle Owen and his life is not the kind of heroic journey we’re going for with this game. (The jawa’s with their rocket launchers wouldn’t make that a very fun activity anyway).

The amount of misinformation around The Old Republic is less surprising when you recognize that it’s looking to be one of 2011’s big players.

The Old Republic: Did We Say 1 Million? Sorry…


Kapow!

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.