Sixcess said:
Azuaron said:
Let me get this straight, an MMO that got over a million subscribers in under two weeks, making it the fastest growing MMO at launch ever, isn't doing good enough?
Not if EA's expectations were that it'd launch with two million. I stress
if because I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me - they've been very very ambitious with TOR. EA didn't throw this kind of money around to get a
moderately successful MMO.
One million isn't really that good. Warhammer Online, an infamous flop, launched with 800,000 subscribers, and that wasn't hyped to near the level of The Old Republic.
TOR runs the real risk of being unable to live up to the unrealistically high expectations of not only its playerbase, but of its investors, and that's not a good place for it to be at.
Well, let's make up some numbers and do some math here:
Star Wars: The Old Republic retails for $60, and you get a 1 month subscription with that. You can buy the thing straight from Origin, so retailers don't necessarily get a cut, and there are also a collector's edition and "security key" thing that you can buy. Ultimately, let's say they average to $50 profit per sale for the first month (I think that's probably low). It has now been a month, and, while EA/Bioware haven't released precise sales figures, current estimates place subscriptions at 1.5 million, and are expected to reach 3 million by the end of the year.
Which means EA/Bioware have currently made $75 million on the game, and will probably make $150 million by the end of the year on initial sales alone. I can't cite actual figures of MMO dropout rates, but, for the sake of mathematical simplicity (and because the numbers happen to line up that way), let's say that every time someone drops out, another person takes their place, so, at the end of the year, with 3 million initial sales, there will still be 1.5 million current subscribers. 1.5 million $12/month (they have deals, so we take the low number) for 11 months (initial month came with the game) comes out to about $200 million. Which means that, after one year, they'll have made back around $350 million.
For a non-MMO, this would be very bad. A non-MMO would need to make its money back, plus profit, basically on launch day to be considered a success, but EA/Bioware are, obviously, in this for the long haul. With 1.5 million subscribers following the first year, they'll hit the half a billion mark around August 2013, but that's assuming zero dropouts and zero newcomers. Every newcomer is $50 additional profit plus $12/month, while every dropout is only $12 loss per month. After that, everything is pure profit while they work on expansions, and expansions are
much cheaper to make and
easily make back their money quickly while getting new subscribers
and encouraging veteran subscribers to stick around longer.
I expect EA and Bioware are perfectly happy with their sales figures. A year and a half ROI isn't bad, if you're thinking about the long term, and after that they're making millions a month while doing very, very little.
