The Old Republic is a SMASH HIT...

[BloatedGuppy]

...and yet paradoxically, still a huge failure, due to some truly ludicrous expectations from EA.

These are the 2012 numbers for sub based MMOs. It's not all of them, but it includes most of the relevant major releases of the past few years, and some of yester-year's hits.

(~ - Approx.)

(*) indicates a statistically significant global/Asian player base.

Dark Age of Camelot - ~35,000
Vanguard - ~40,000
Star Trek Online - ~55,000
Warhammer Online ? ~100,000
Ultima Online ? ~100,000
Everquest ? ~ 100,000
City of Heroes/Villians - ~125,000
Age of Conan ? ~140,000
Rift ? ~250,000
Lord of the Rings Online ? ~260,000
EVE Online ? ~350,000-450,000(*)
Lineage - ~900,000(*)
Lineage 2 - ~900,000(*)
The Old Republic - ~1.4 Million
Aion - ~2.3 Million(*)
World of Warcraft - ~10 Million(*)

With "only" 250K subscribers, LOTRO and Rift are hugely profitable. The ones hovering between 50K and 100K are keeping their heads above water. This is probably a good rule of thumb to gauge MMO success:

50K-100K - Sustainable, small profit.
100K-250K - Decent profit. Small hit.
250K-500K - Substantial hit. A very successful game. Extremely profitable.
500K-1M - Extraordinarily profitable game. Genre defining. This was where the original Everquest peaked, and at the time it was consider a smash hit that legitimized the genre and spawned a host of imitators.
1M+ Monolithic hit.
10M+Pop cultural phenomenon.

TOR, peaking at 2M+ subs and currently hovering around 1.4, is an extraordinarily successful game for this genre. Yet, it is widely viewed as a catastrophe, both by casual fans of the genre and to some degree by EA, who were hoping for their own version of WoW. It's the 2nd most successful western MMO of all time, eclipsed ONLY by WoW, which peaked at about 4.5M western subs and currently sits at around 2-3 million.

The biggest failure, by order of magnitude, would be the woeful Star Trek Online, which also has an extremely prominent (and expensive) sci-fi IP and yet hasn't even managed half the sub base of universally derided "flop" Warhammer Online.

 

[Dryk]

Your comparison assumes that they all have comparable budgets, I guarantee that's not the case

 

[9thRequiem]

Not shown : Production costs.
While figures on just how much TOR cost to make vary, it's a much higher figure than, for example, Rift. With the money spent, it would need a lot more subscribers over a longer period to break into success.
Of course, that only affects it if your metric on "success" is "raking in the cash" (which you seem to, so ...)

I think the main reason it's considered a failure is that the numbers aren't anywhere near what you'd expect given the IP. That, and the number of servers means playing it can feel like inhabiting a ghost town.

 

[Hazy992]

Yeah but how much did TOR actually cost in comparison to the others?

 

[BloatedGuppy]

TOR was extremely expensive, but given the profit margins on even a 500K sub game are extreme, you'd have to think it wouldn't take long to make up the gap. Production costs are a one time expense.

Of course, that only affects it if your metric on "success" is "raking in the cash" (which you seem to, so ...)

A profitable MMO will add new content faster, fix bugs faster, and generally become a higher quality product. Part of the reason WoW has the voluminous content depth and polish that it has become associated with is a LOT of money has been poured back into it. MMOs in "maintenance mode" with < 100,000 subs often have to make do with piddling balance patches months apart, if anything, and little to no new content. If it's broken, it stays broken.

A good thing to keep in mind if you want to try and compare it to single player games is that TOR has been out about 6 months now. People who have been paying a sub fee all this time have now bought the game about 3 times. So if you take an initial 2-3 million box sales, and add another 2-3 million "box sales" in the form of sub fees, you're pushing into some fairly rarefied air.

All the same, I think it's clear TOR has underperformed expectations. I just think it's notable how much WoW's unique and unprecedented success has distorted the perception of what "success" actually looks like in the MMO genre.

 

[AndrewF022]

Hmm, about as expected really.. although the list is missing a few big MMO names, like Runescape, which was hovering around the 900k subscribers/players mark, and Dungeons and Dragons Online, which I thought was still sitting around the 100k mark.

Either way, whats killing The Old Republic is its development cost, and I'd imagine it costs a fair bit to maintain and produce updates for in these early days. It really needs an increase in subscribers or else it'll have to go F2P. Doing so might be the only way to 'save it' really, hopefully it finds its feet a bit soon, it would be a shame for it to bite the dust early because it can't sustain itself, it's a promising game, just released at the wrong time with the wrong business model attached to it.

 

[ultramarine486]

TOR was extremely expensive, but given the profit margins on even a 500K sub game are extreme, you'd have to think it wouldn't take long to make up the gap. Production costs are a one time expense.

Of course, that only affects it if your metric on "success" is "raking in the cash" (which you seem to, so ...)

A profitable MMO will add new content faster, fix bugs faster, and generally become a higher quality product. Part of the reason WoW has the voluminous content depth and polish that it has become associated with is a LOT of money has been poured back into it. MMOs in "maintenance mode" with < 100,000 subs often have to make do with piddling balance patches months apart, if anything, and little to no new content. If it's broken, it stays broken.

Course updates, patches, new content and things like server maintenance all cost money taking away from their so called 'success'. They're also losing people hand over fist and without a massive ad campaign, which also cost money, they're unlikely to get some much needed new blood into the system to pay for such things. Not to mention word of mouth is ripping into the game for it's various failings which also contributes to less people wanting to make the investment which cuts into profits.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Hmm, about as expected really.. although the list is missing a few big MMO names, like Runescape, which was hovering around the 900k subscribers/players mark, and Dungeons and Dragons Online, which I thought was still sitting around the 100k mark.

I trimmed a few. There were dozens, especially under 100K. I left out Second Life at around 1M because it doesn't strike me as an MMO proper.

Uhm, where do you have those numbers from exactly?

MMOData.net. Numbers are from March.

I still don't trust those World of Warcraft numbers really, I bet there's some trickery with Asian countries etc.

Blizzard has always used some serious smoke and mirrors when it comes to their WoW numbers. I'm given to understand a lot of the Asian "subs" are not "subs" in the traditional sense. Still, WoW is a ridiculous statistical outlier, even if you take a more modest view of their claims.

Also, they never actually had 1.7 million subscribers they just spiced the numbers a little...

Oh I don't doubt it. Even at 500K though, TOR would be a substantial success, especially if they could hold that number over a long period of time. That's sort of my point. As an MMO, it's actually been hugely successful. As EA's prize pig, it's been a flop. And public perception regarding MMO's is just hopelessly skewed because of WoW, everyone labors under this gross misunderstanding that anything shy of 10M subs is a calamity when nothing could be further from the truth.

Course updates, patches, new content and things like server maintenance all cost money taking away from their so called 'success'. They're also losing people hand over fist and without a massive ad campaign, which also cost money, they're unlikely to get some much needed new blood into the system to pay for such things. Not to mention word of mouth is ripping into the game for it's various failings which also contributes to less people wanting to make the investment which cuts into profits.

How would you define a "success". So far you've hand-waved quality, or eventual quality, and you've hand-waved profit. What's the Ultramarine benchmark for "success"? Whether you personally enjoyed it?

Notably, I cancelled my TOR sub months ago. I'm no champion of the game. I just find the distorted perceptions regarding MMOs in general and TOR in particular on this forum bemusing. I thought I'd make a post about it using TOR as the pillar for the conversation. As usual, however, it would appear I underestimated the ferocity with which people cling to their confirmation biases.

 

[Windcaler]

The production cost argument makes some sense but as I recall TOR along with most MMOs paid off their costs. So if thats the case does production cost matter after the game has been paid off? I think not

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Eh, I still remember quite a few games hitting 1 million or above shortly after launch (like Age of Conan for instance) that weren't by EA and didn't have this much cash pumped into them that were considered failures: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2008/jun/06/ageofconanhits1million

The question is how many of those players they can keep and the downwards trend doesn't particularly spell good tidings.

They were popularly considered failures, yes, and AoC had a particularly sharp plunge due to the dubious state it got released in (I think it lost something like 90% of its subs after the first month, which was staggering). AoC and WAR and LOTRO were some of the first major releases after the EQ/WoW era, in which the established trend for MMOs was to hit big and then keep growing too, so everyone's expectations were that a steep dropoff was calamitous and a reversal of expectations. As more and more time has gone by though, games hitting big and growing has become anomalous, they usually spike and then settle.

Even at a miserly 100,000 AoC is still making a small profit. It's not a big success by any means, but it's making them enough dosh that they expanded it, and spent the time and resources necessary to develop a "FTP" model for it. (And I put FTP in sarcasm parentheses because history has demonstrated that "FTP" games like LOTRO are often anything but, and their new model tends to be more profitable than the sub system, while also more financially punitive to the heavy user).

TOR bleeding subs after the first free month is pretty much industry standard. The question is where will they settle. I think EA hoped they'd be a 5M+ phenomenon, but I think those hopes were whimsical and ill considered. I'm not sure we'll EVER see another WoW, especially when you consider how long these games tend to retain their core player base. For heavens sake, 100K people are still playing Ultima Online? That is notable. Particularly notable when you consider how much of the market WoW has cornered and is clinging to with an iron grasp.

Long story short, if TOR settles around 800K to 1M subs, it's going to be one of the biggest hits the genre has ever seen. Especially when you consider it's not in Asian markets at all, and those usually comprise about 60-70% of the player base for global MMOs like WoW or Aion. And in spite of this, it's popularly considered a giant disaster, and EA likely considers it to be under-performing dramatically.

If anything this should THRILL you. More evidence of EA's rampant bastardry and the ridiculous expectations their development houses must labor under. =D

The production cost argument makes some sense but as I recall TOR along with most MMOs paid off their costs. So if thats the case does production cost matter after the game has been paid off? I think not

No, it doesn't matter terribly. It's somewhat notable in TOR's case only because extra content that incorporates heavy voice acting is going to be more expensive than usual to create.

 

[Thoric485]

It's the idiotic budget - 200 million in development and at least 50 million in marketing. They will not be in the green until 2013, and after that a 30% chunk of their profits will go to Lucas. To have any hope of justifying this whole endeavor in front of investors, they'll need to enter 2013 with a stable 500k paying subs. Looking at the sharp decline, I very much doubt they will.

And peaks are seriously overrated. EVE Online has yet to reach 500k subs, but in its 9 years it has generated over $300 million in revenue and only keeps growing, completely dwarfing the success of wanna-be "WoW killers" like AoC and WAR that sported 700-800k subs at launch, and then lost over 80% of them in under a year. In the long run, SWTOR doesn't seem to be faring any better than those two.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

It's the idiotic budget - 200 million in development and at least 50 million in marketing. They will not be in the green until 2013, and after that a 30% chunk of their profits will go to Lucas. To have any hope of justifying this whole endeavor in front of investors, they'll need to enter 2013 with a stable 500k paying subs. Looking at the sharp decline, I very much doubt they will.

And peaks are seriously overrated. EVE Online has yet to reach 500k subs, but in its 9 years it has generated over $300 million in revenue and only keeps growing, completely dwarfing the success of titles like AoC and WAR that sported 700-800k subs at launch, and then lost over 80% of them in under a year. In the long run, SWTOR doesn't seem to be faring any better than those two.

I'm surprised EVE's profits are that low, actually. They've held a sizable base for a long time now. It feels like that game has been around forever.

SWTOR's sub drop off hasn't been anywhere near as steep as WAR or AoC, and having played all three of those games at launch, it's not anywhere near as flawed a game, either. Of the three I'm the most positively disposed towards WAR...I BADLY wanted to love that game, and I did love much about it...but it was fundamentally broken in ways that simply cannot be fixed without a redesign of the entire thing from the ground up.

You make a strong point about the 30% cut Lucas takes. I do think if TOR can settle out around 500-800K subs the game will be fine, but I could see EA scuttling Bioware regardless (because that's what EA does). They need to fix their end game. The 1-50 game is actually quite solid and reasonably entertaining (if a tad conservative), but it falls off a cliff after that. For a FTP game ala GW2 that would've been fine, but they need some kind of treadmill to keep people yakking up that $15 a month.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Taken a look at the figures spent on making and marketing TOR? It needs a lot more than 500k subscribers. A LOT.

Can someone good at math and economics do the figures?

2-3 million boxes sold at roughly $50-60 each, if you're not accounting for collectors editions or digital deluxe.

And let's say 1M people paying $15 a month for 4-5 months. That's an extremely conservative estimate.

How much a bite does that take out of the rumored $250 million price tag? What's a good monthly cost estimate for servicing the game/content delivery?

My gut reaction is that you're underestimating just how BIG a success 500K subs is. EQ carried 500K subs for a few years and it was an unprecedented blockbuster for its time. I believe at one point after it hit big there was something like 150 MMOs in the pipeline. Most failed, but that was the kind of land rush 500K subs kicked off.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well the exact numbers and shenanigans are pretty vague but with 200mil for developmnet alone this is a pretty bad turnout.
And sadly with MMOs you don't just develop everything in one go, yes they put out a sizable chunk of content but it's been 6 months and people have are already seen it all, that is why the subs are going downhill, people just don't have anything to do anymore.

Now to make more content for the people who barely keep you above water, if they will stay at all... I'm not sure it makes much sense for anyone.

 

[Fr]anc[is]

A good thing to keep in mind if you want to try and compare it to single player games is that TOR has been out about 6 months now. People who have been paying a sub fee all this time have now bought the game about 3 times. So if you take an initial 2-3 million box sales, and add another 2-3 million "box sales" in the form of sub fees, you're pushing into some fairly rarefied air.

Unless TOR is charging $45 a month, your math is way off. 6 months, minus the free *snicker* month that came with the game is 5 months. 5 X $15 = $75. That's one more box sale, not 3

 

[BloatedGuppy]

For that we would need to know exactly how much TOR cost to make and market.

All the figures I have heard have been between 500-700m, not 250.

After doing some google work, the 200m figure is apparently just for development, marketing not withstanding. I think they spent a lot more on marketing than they did on development - the number of ads popping up everywhere you looked were insane.

500M to 700M? That seems a tad absurd. I'd be willing to speculate as high as 300M. I'm no marketing expert but I don't think they dropped 400-500 million dollars buying ad space. If I'm wrong, I will cheerfully eat crow.

anc[is]Unless TOR is charging $45 a month, your math is way off. 6 months, minus the free *snicker* month that came with the game is 5 months. 5 X $15 = $75. That's one more box sale, not 3

You are correct, my math is generally terrible at the best of times, but that was bad even for me.