two million subscribers

When Electronic Arts announced that Star Wars: The Old Republic is their largest development project ever, I immediately became worried for the title. In all likelihood, The Old Republic has an enormous budget, more than most other MMOs can shake a stick at, and as a result will have the eyes of EA glaring down on it when it does officially launch, and the resulting post-month 1 subscriber numbers are presented to the bigwigs. As I’ve mentioned before on several postmortem “What happened” episodes, the number one cause of MMO death is not unsubstantial subscriber numbers, but lower than what the developer/publisher wanted.

So a game like The Old Republic will likely require a lot of subscribers to meet that budget they hooked into the title, and EA was kind enough to tell us exactly what that number is to break even: One million. Now, there are only a handful of titles that have over a million paying subscribers. A small handful, a very small handful. For some reason, one million has become the benchmark for success, even though several of the top 10 mainstream MMOs do not have one million subscribers. Not only does EA believe they will hit the one million mark, but they can see the game going up to two million and over.

Unfortunately EA may be setting themselves up not for failure, but for disappointment. Disappointment we can only hope doesn’t translate into EA pulling a Tabula Rasa and shutting the title down a year later. So far the experience from press testers has been positive, so who knows? Titles like Eve Online, Runescape, World of Warcraft, and Fallen Earth are not exclusive to breaking the rule of MMO releases: That the population peaks at launch and, following a sharp decrease after the free month, a gradual decline.

I think that, when The Old Republic does go into preorder, it will be right up there with Age of Conan and Warhammer Online for the most orders of the year. If Bioware can pull a higher than normal retention rate following launch, it will be good tidings for the foreseeable future. High expectations are dangerous, but not guaranteed to end in disappointment. Remember that.