Nenad said:
How could SW:TOR not make any money with subscriptions? I mean it Star Wars and Bioware (EA will probably help too... somehow. With ad campaigns, maybe?). If SW and Bioware can't make it who can?
While I disagree with Mr Huberts reasons, I do suspect that he has come to the correct conclusions about SW:TOR. The problem isn't the games revenue model. It doesn't matter if it is F2P or Subscription. The problem is that the massive costs of producing the game (some estimates go between 1/4 to 1/2 a Billion dollars!) will be next to impossible to recoup in a reasonable amount of time utilizing the known and dependable customer base.
World of Warcraft is a mind blowing success with 12 million subscribers (or whatever it is) because the game was built and published on a budget that expected 300k to 500k to be a stable and profitable user base. Everything above that was just money hats. The games ability to make money lies in the difference between what it costs to make and operate subtracted from what its operating revenue brings in.
Eve is another great example of this. They did not pour hundreds or millions of dollars into the game. They spent enough to make it such that it would be profitable with less than 100k subscribers. They hit better than those numbers and grew it from there, maintaining a steady profit along the way. It doesn't matter if you are a niche product or a mainstream AAA list title. It does not matter if you tell the best RPG's in the business. All that matters is can you attract enough paying users to recoup the costs of making the product and keeping the lights on in an ongoing manner, ideally while pulling 10-20 points of profit out of it all. it does not matter which revenue model you use. Subscription, F2P, Retail ala GW's and Diablo or Starcraft. Whatever. Moneys in must exceed moneys spent.
And here is where SW:TOR runs into a problem. I have read in a few places where some estimates seem to suspect that in order to simply begin to recoup costs SW:TOR will require something in the neighborhood of 10 million subscribers. Think about that. They could be pushing World of Warcraft numbers and still not be making a dime, simply because they spent so much to produce the thing. Now this may be doable. They may show us all how its done and make the next great thing. But it's still an insane business model.
Just the simple idea that in order to get a return on this massive investment the game will have to pull better than 80-90% of the existing paying MMO playerbase is scary. It assumes that the game will have to pull in pretty much ALL WOW players. ALL WAR players, ALL DAoC players. etc etc. Or the game will have to pretty much double the pool of existing MMO players and bring a ton of new players into the mix. Now to give credit, there is history of this being done. Blizzard did it with WOW. But there are a few elements there that don't quite make it such a high probability of happening again. Lets examine a few critical facts that make SW:TOR an entirely different set of circumstances;
1. Yeah Blizzard did it, but no previous game based on the SW IP has maneged to pull it off. SWG anybody? Clone Wars online? yes its a wildly popular IP, but there is no evidence that it can pull off that hail mary. certainly not enough to bet everything on to such a degree.
2. Yeah once again Blizzard did it. But they did it in part by leveraging their extensive RTS (WC1 2 and 3, Diablo, SC) playerbase, which had not previously crossed over with MMO's to a high degree. Bioware makes RPG's, a playerbase that already has fairly deep saturation in the MMO arena. They may get lucky and lure some X-Box and PS3 fans over to their PC's to give it a try... but counting on 3-5 million of them? I think GM stock is a better investment.
3. The elephant in the room. Once again, yeah WOW pulled it off. But they didn't expect to. They didn't gamble the whole game on increasing the existing customer base more than a very small amount. it was a happy accident. They would have been profitable without it. They just wouldn't be shoring up Activision to a tune of 2/3 of the profits. EA is gambling everything on doubling the customer base. And gambling an insane amount of money in a rather tenuous economy. It may work. These guys may be next years money hat wearing supreme gaming gods. But it is still a completely unhinged gamble to make.
So yeah, this guys screed about how SW:TOR won't make any money because its not F2P is pretty much self serving pap. But somewhere in there is still the correct base conclussion. It will be very very hard for the game to actually make any money, no matter what they do from this point forward.
