It makes no difference whether it's Star Wars and Bioware or not. If you make your money back, you cease to be a failure. At that point, you're playing with free money. If anything, it failed to meet expectations. Look at my previous post to learn the difference between the two.
And nobody threw the number $300 million around. Even still, why would you bother using outdated, unsubstantiated numbers supposedly "thrown around" by random posters on a World of Warcraft forum to form your current opinion? Aside from wanting to stir up shit?
So many arbitrary benchmarks.
So is losing 51% of your player base a failure? What about 35%?
Or is it money? If you don't make a 136% profit in the first year is that failure? Or is 98% a failure?
Or is it not meeting expectations of the parent company? Or the company itself? Or do they have to meet the expectations of bloggers?
Profit = Success. Anything else is arbitrary crap driven by a subjective measure of "goodness".
(Warframe) - Dragon & Typhoon-
(Neverwinter) - Trickster Rogue & Guardian Fighter -
It's not bad, it's just old. I use the same rhetoric with SWTOR as I do with WoW: A good game but I'm tired of it. Thing is, the people who like WoW-style games will probably play WoW, that's only logical. The things that SWTOR did well are the storytelling and imo the PvP, but the PvP isn't better than GW2's imo and according to many not even better than that of WoW's. The storytelling is better than anything Blizzard has ever done or anything previously done in a MMO but an MMO designed the way SWTOR is is not the right medium for it. You want to rush to max level because that's where the stuff is happening, not trudge through 100 hours of dialogue questing - that is the typical MMO players' mindset and that completely breaks SWTOR. Bioware should just have made KotOR3 or not done something built on the WoW foundation. If you want to copy something make sure it's better than what you are copying, Bioware didn't necesarily do that.
I would say it was a failure. There's no way that during the 6+ years of development and ultra hype they ever imagined that less than a year after release they would go Free-To-Play.
This is something I can somewhat agree with. The hotkey mmo is kind of meh, nowadays. Gw2 and tera really upped the bar when it comes to combat.
If swtor had been more action RPG-y it might have had a little more sticking power.
Personally, I like the whole having 30+ abilities to work with and a limited resource pool. If they had done that with a action rpg thing like GW2 I would still be subscribed.
(Warframe) - Dragon & Typhoon-
(Neverwinter) - Trickster Rogue & Guardian Fighter -
Wow this thread blew up fast. Well, might as well drop a couple of sources in here.
Eighty million?
Here: http://www.gamespot.com/news/star-wa...nalyst-6312400
Implied one hundred million?
Here: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/sw...t-ever-project
Almost two hundred million?
Here: http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2012/...tic-gamble/#/0
Three hundred million claim?
Here: http://www.1up.com/news/ea-louse-blo...hammer-failure
TOR profitable with half a million?
Here: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...h-500-000-subs
Now that "look ma, I'm an analyst," Pachter has always seemed to love whoring himself out to anyone that will quote him. So I stopped paying attention to his "how can I get paid for saying this" bullshit years ago.
About TOR's development?
Here: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/03/08/be...t-the-problem/
Last edited by SirRobin; 2012-09-29 at 02:31 PM.
Sir Robin, the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot.
Who had nearly fought the Dragon of Angnor.
Who had almost stood up to the vicious Chicken of Bristol.
And who had personally wet himself, at the Battle of Badon Hill.
Maybe, in the sense that they probably were hoping it would be popular enough to warrant a sub. model. But I think now that they've decided to move on to F2P it shows that the game is not dead yet.
"In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance." Paradox of tolerance
Now back to my earlier post.
The short answer is that of course TOR isn't a "failure." The last "official" figures I recall was that TOR had two point four million in sales. It also still has hundreds of thousands playing, and supposedly enjoying, the fruits of BioWare's labor. So, no, it would not be "fair" to consider TOR a failure.
The longer answer is that while TOR wasn't a failure per se. It also turned out to be, "not the droids you're looking for," for not only hundreds of thousands but even the company that made it. EA has long wanted its own WoW-like goldmine and TOR was simply its latest, and biggest, attempt. So for many, including its maker, TOR was likely a "disappointment" rather than a failure. Though in John Riccitiello's eyes, they may well be one in the same.
Last edited by SirRobin; 2012-09-29 at 03:00 PM.
Sir Robin, the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot.
Who had nearly fought the Dragon of Angnor.
Who had almost stood up to the vicious Chicken of Bristol.
And who had personally wet himself, at the Battle of Badon Hill.
I think this point should be expounded upon. EA announced that TOR HAD 2.4 million sales in May, at least 4 months ago. That's making the assumption that nobody else bought the game afterwards.
More than 500k subscribers is better than nearly every sub-based MMO that exists today.
That's pretty much spot on.
I'll start by saying that I'm a current subscriber to TOR, and I do like the game a great deal, especially the endgame PvE.
Let's flip the question: is TOR a success? I think the vast majority of us would say no, TOR was not a success. Ergo, it was a failure.
Now there are degrees of failure: small, large, catastrophic, recoverable, irrecoverable.
I would say TOR was a large failure. It failed to meet the targets by a significant amount, and it lost a lot of subscribers. However, I think it's a recoverable failure. I think it has the potential to stabilize and keep going for a few years, and eventually become profitable. I don't think it failed so badly that the best course would be to shut down.
Any question around failure needs to be framed from the point of view of your target audience.
Would an investor claim that SWTOR was a failure? I find it difficult to believe that the game did not make money or a decent ROI.
Would a current subscriber claim that SWTOR was a failure? In most likelihood, not at all
would a prospective player find it a failure? I don't assume to that to be the case. it has been my reading that a lot of players have welcomed the F2P move on and will even return to the game under a F2P model.
Would an Ex-subscriber view it as a failure? I fall into that category and my response would be a resounding no, Sub count means nothing to anyone who isn't a developer, and I find it difficult to see anyone not playing something they enjoy because it has less end users than other competitors. I would add that I enjoyed my time in the game, (as limited as it was) but my heart was elsewhere. In addition, people leave games for subjective reasons (direction of development, speed of content delivery, etc.) and its difficult to say that a developer holistically failed because they did not meet a certain aspect of a player's preference criteria.
Would the Developer view it as a failure? Adopting a different revenue model hardly exemplifies a failure, That's like claiming that the banking system is in disarray because people prefer to conduct transactions using Paypal as opposed to using direct bank transfers.
The only plausible argument that can be made is that it did not meet the studios long term expectations, but even then we'd be assuming that this is the case.
With the state of the MMO market in a declining trend, and with every game on the market having lost a share of subscribers, I do not think that any one game can be singled out as a failure because of it lost an X% of its population.
TOR is a good game, with a good share of the MMO market (possibly 2nd or 3rd MMO ranked MMO from a subs POV) and is most likely profitable. Hard to lump it in the failure category by any measure.
Last edited by Antipathy; 2012-09-29 at 04:36 PM.
{I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. }
This rationale makes zero sense. Just because something isn't a "success" doesn't mean it's a "failure" just like something that isn't a "failure" doesn't mean it's a "success". There is a middle ground here which most people calling the game a failure are unwilling to tread upon because, for some unknown reason, everything is being measured in black and white.
Ergo, argumentum ad populum.
(Warframe) - Dragon & Typhoon-
(Neverwinter) - Trickster Rogue & Guardian Fighter -
Thread's titles like this are dumb I don't care what game it is. Everyone loves a "train wreck" and it brings out all the derp armchair experts. If there wasn't some intelligent posts debunking some of the nonsense in these threads I'd instant gib them all.
I think it failed just by the fact that it being forced to go f2p. I'm not even sure if that game has over a million subs anymore.
The failure belongs to the people who expected somethingelse then current SW:TOR.
They said "we are making a new WoW but in SW universe" but most of the SW community was expecting something like SW:Galaxies. Only failure Bioware made was at the start of the path : not making this game a semi-sandbox Star wars experience. They chose to go SW:TOR way..
Why am I back here, I don't even play these games anymore
The problem with the internet is parallel to its greatest achievement: it has given the little man an outlet where he can be heard. Most of the time however, the little man is a little man because he is not worth hearing.
I'm not entirely sure about the bolded part. I recall their marketing plans to involve terms like: "We're not in Azeroth anymore...". That is one of the few things that really annoyed me about their marketing campaign. It wasn't trying to kill World of Warcraft, but it really was smearing it with a negative brush!