If you're making $100 profit, 300% of that would be $300. If you're making $1,000,000 profit, 300% of that would be 3,000,000. Do you see how using a number like '300%' is not an indicator of success? Until they release actual dollar values showing how much they really profited, and then show how it's considered a 'profit,' then it's completely stupid it assume that '300%' means anything relevant.Actually, no it doesn't. Turbine said they increased their profits by 300% when they switched to F2P. How can you increase your profits by 300% if they're negative? A switch to a F2P hybrid model does NOT equal unprofitable.
For instance, some companies will shift their books around to show a profit when they are really in the negative for a specific time period. It's like if Blizzard was down 5 million subs in one quarter but gained 7 million in the next quarter, showing it as a bi quarterly gain of 2 million subs and not counting the loss or the gain of 5 million. I'm not confident that F2P will bail EA out of the 'no profit zone' because it's clear that there are big problems with SWTOR that their devs are simply not fixing.
When you hire temps for a project, and that project is finished, it is common practice to let them go. However, SWTOR is not a 'finished project.' It's a project with long term development, so hiring and letting go 'temps' is a bad business practice and using that as an explanation for lay offs is especially bad logic.There is no evidence that SWTOR is not making profit. Going by personal judgement and assumption doesn't make everything else moot.
The lay-offs you're talking about are mostly what EA does with every game they have ever developed. They hire temps and when the product is released they get rid of the majority of them. As for the product going F2P, the F2P only applies to leveling. Its not like the game itself is now free. You still will have to pay in order to enjoy the game. I don't know how any of these can be used to imply that the game is not making profit.
'Hey, where are the guys we had working on class development and pvp balance?'
'Oh, we released the game already, so we let those guys go, they were temps anyway.'
Do you not see how that is kind of a ridiculous conversation for a game that requires constant development? You're basically saying they hired shit employees to do an important task then let them go because they didn't expect to maintain the integrity of the game they are releasing.
Also, the game is soon to be F2P up to level 50, and the only time you have to buy the game is when you expect to pvp more than X number of games in a week or if you plan on raiding (also, the price of the box will go from $60 to $15). Since the majority of the game is spent leveling (and consequently the majority of the quality and fun to be had is also with leveling), then it's safe to consider the game F2P for all intents and purposes.
And really, the logic isn't that 'oh, they went free to play, so they failed.' The logic is that they started off with a business model of 'buy the content and pay a sub fee to continue playing' and then went from that model to one where players get the majority of the game without paying a dime. The part I want you and others to try really hard to understand is that we are not talking about a game that was developed on a low budget with a business model of F2P from the very beginning, with mild popularity and micro transactions easily putting the project in the black.
No, this was a big MMO with a huge franchise backing it by a developer who spent a record amount of money to get this game off the ground, where the only way to sufficiently pay back the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars was to go by the B2P + subs model and meet a minimum number of box sales + subs over the duration of a year or longer, in order to begin to break even.
The game hasn't even been out for a year yet (which was the original estimated length of time the game would have to retain 2 million or more subs in order to be profitable) and they are going F2P with the business model and are down to half a million subs. Not only is it safe to assume they are not making a profit, it's probably safe to assume that they aren't even meeting costs at this point (because the game didn't become free to EA once it went live, they have to pay to keep it going on top of the original costs, you know, server costs, employees, ongoing development).
It's clear to everyone at this point that EA bet the farm on this game and it was a bad bet. My only concern is that the game won't have the budget going into the future to fix the problems it has, let alone keep future content rolling out.