Analyst Says EA Investors "Betting Against" Old Republic

[Carlston]

EA, afraid of anything not rehashed, revmoited, involving sports with a new year on it.

Once the company that helped indies get games now, now thinking a Star wars game won't do well...

You not out to kill wow. Good mind set.

Your out to make a star wars games. Star wars gamers will flock. Wow is fantasy, Starwars is sci fi. Support Star wars it will do wonderful things.

Or you can do what Atari did with say Dungeons and Dragons online.
Atari didn't even link or ad the game on the main web site.
Choke devs making them ok every change with three companies, Hasbro, Atari and Wizards of the coast. If one said no the entire project was scraped. DDO only became a real game after it freed itself from Atari and could police itself to make more fun, content.

This is where you give the investors the finger and go on to make bank for yourself EA.
Or you could do what Disney did and scrap it next to launch date like the Pirates of the Caribbean game. Cause nothing shows brains like making a game up to 99.9 done and throwing it away to lose money and insure you make? Nothing.

I might even try it, yet I can't stand MMO's. Who knows? Maybe if you take chances again like in the wing commander/ultima days you might make money.

Or you can play it safe and spit out Madden and the sims and scoot by never impacting the gaming world again, except for nice safe sports sims with updated rosters.

Shart or get off the pot.

 

[Flying Dagger]

Star wars is fantasy, set in space, and even if it doesn't think it is, it is competing with wow.

However, I don't think WoW is the final destination of all MMOs... Think Hoover, or titanic. Nothing is too big to be sunk.

Companies running against them just need ways to extract the people making the right calls at activision, and wait til they get replaced by people-people making the wrong ones.

 

[DTWolfwood]

Its too bad the game isn't based on the Star Wars everyone knows.

Bullshit, that was the reason why KOTOR was so much better than any other Star Wars game. It was set in its own time period, with its own aesthetic that still fit with the universe.

This game looks exactly like stuff out of the movies, which bothers me. The republic troops look exactly like Clone Troopers, despite the fact that this game takes place at least three thousand some years before Clone Troopers even existed.

TOR looks good, but visually I find it repulsively generic.

the more ppl recognize the better.

as far as i can see the gameplay looks generic. I've long since fallen off its bandwagon. waiting on some more hack'n slash MMOs to release, at least you don't fall asleep when in combat.

 

[DTWolfwood]

Its too bad the game isn't based on the Star Wars everyone knows.

That has already been done. It was called Galaxies. No surprise that nobody remembers that one, though.

You realize that it was a the terrible game mechanics that killed it right? and the universe was the only reason anyone stayed in it for so long. The game was terrible not its setting.

 

[Vrach]

Oh and heads up. Nearing a million forum users on the official site, take out the doubled accounts and add the much greater amount of people following and waiting for the game from the sidelines and it adds up to a pretty successful looking launch.

The thing is, a successful launch doesn't mean a whole lot. Plenty of MMO games have a successful launch, but eventually people get bored and go back to WoW. The trick is hooking people in so they keep paying their fees, it's no good to have 5 million people play for the first week and then 500 every week after that.

You're right about BioWare, though - not a company to rush a product, and when they deliver, by God they deliver. If anyone can do it, they can.

Idd, but it's not just BioWare that can deliver, though I suspect it'll be the first significant blow. We're about to see a shitstorm of new MMOs with decent-high quality and a different appeal. With WoW selling a monumentally low under 5 million Cataclysms in a month (a number, while seemingly impressive, is actually not considering the circumstances and the fact something like CoD: BO beat it's month sales in a single day), I'm seeing the near future and it's filled with different MMOs rather than a tyrant with a few feudal neighbours

 

[SonicWaffle]

Idd, but it's not just BioWare that can deliver, though I suspect it'll be the first significant blow.

BioWare have a track record of making truly excellent games, which means that those gamers who fall inbetween casual and hardcore (that is, play more than Bejewelled but don't pull 48-hour Modern Warfare marathons) will be able to look at TOR and say "Oh, those guys made Mass Effect, they do quality work". I think the impact of the brand name will be one of the more significant factors, personally, due to BioWare's reputation for quality.

We're about to see a shitstorm of new MMOs with decent-high quality and a different appeal.

Different is good, but it'll be a few years until people pull their minds out of the "WoW sells, clone it" bucket. A successful TOR would certainly help a lot with that but a failure (real or perceived) could set the industry back and reinforce the idea that only cartoonish swords-and-sorcery will sell.

With WoW selling a monumentally low under 5 million Cataclysms in a month (a number, while seemingly impressive, is actually not considering the circumstances and the fact something like CoD: BO beat it's month sales in a single day), I'm seeing the near future and it's filled with different MMOs rather than a tyrant with a few feudal neighbours

It's still pretty impressive, man - remember, people only paid for Black Ops once, but that right there are five million WoW players who'll keep paying their subs until either they finish or they die. Black Ops may have outsold Cataclysm but in the long run, I'm willing to bet Blizzard make the most money from their game.

It'd be nice to have an open landscape for more MMO games. However, I can see it having downsides too; with MMOs being the moneyspinners they are (or have the potential to be), in a more open market developers might consider pushing more resources into MMO development rather than traditional solo games. That'd suck for me, being as I am a traditional solo gamer, but I can't fault publishers for going where the money is...

 

[JerrytheBullfrog]

Oh and heads up. Nearing a million forum users on the official site, take out the doubled accounts and add the much greater amount of people following and waiting for the game from the sidelines and it adds up to a pretty successful looking launch.

The thing is, a successful launch doesn't mean a whole lot. Plenty of MMO games have a successful launch, but eventually people get bored and go back to WoW. The trick is hooking people in so they keep paying their fees, it's no good to have 5 million people play for the first week and then 500 every week after that.

You're right about BioWare, though - not a company to rush a product, and when they deliver, by God they deliver. If anyone can do it, they can.

Idd, but it's not just BioWare that can deliver, though I suspect it'll be the first significant blow. We're about to see a shitstorm of new MMOs with decent-high quality and a different appeal. With WoW selling a monumentally low under 5 million Cataclysms in a month (a number, while seemingly impressive, is actually not considering the circumstances and the fact something like CoD: BO beat it's month sales in a single day), I'm seeing the near future and it's filled with different MMOs rather than a tyrant with a few feudal neighbours

5 million is monumentally low now? When that's more than WotLK or BC sold in the same amount of time? When it hasn't even been released in China, where you have 1/3 to 1/2 of the game's subscribers?

Uhhhhh, okay then.

 

[Atmos Duality]

*snip*trainwreck*snip*

I'm calling it.

Well, hate to rain on your parade, but in this case it's about as obvious as the sun rising.

Blizzard was oversold on server space for two months on launch.
Take that value and quadruple it: That's the mark that the Old Republic has to hit to remain competitive for more than a couple of months (before everyone else just reverts back to WoW).