We knew Electronic Arts had spent a truck of money developing Star Wars: The Old Republic, but a report from the LA Times pegs the cost of BioWare’s MMO debut at almost $200 million.
That number is still rising, obviously, as the sprawling development staff (at times, as many as 800 people) continues work on the game.
The Old Republic launched on December 20, and represents a massive gamble for the publisher. You don’t spent $200 million on a project that’s not expected to perform, but we won’t know for a few months yet whether The Old Republic has paid off. Plenty of MMOs have experienced spectacular starts, only to wither on the vine, as genre fans go back to their old haunts, like World of Warcraft.
There are plenty of other interesting bits about BioWare’s process, too, including that BioWare tried to pick up Lord of the Rings, A Game of Thrones and various Marvel properties at one point.
Maybe it all happened in a parallel universe. In any case, you should read the whole story.
The big story is EA removing a cancellation option from their page here at the end of the free month, and then banning forum users (From Origin? unknown) who posted the direct link. Klepek, get on this!
@doomocrat said:
Not sure it's a real story. Jeff quit just fine.
@doomocrat: I heard about that but didn't have the issue myself, I cancelled about 4 hours before my game was due to resub. Can understand how it would have the community up in arms however.
There was a lot of buzz on SA and NeoGAF about people having the links removed. If I can find screenshots or anything credible I'll send them your way.
That was a bug only encountered in certain browser configurations and has been fixed. A non-story.
There's a ton of hearsay about the disappearing unsubscribe button. Plenty of people quit just fine.
There's smoke, but it might just be blowing out of someone's *** at this point.
@doomocrat said:
This isn't a real story, just bugs and hyperreacting users spreading rumours before a fair explanation can be given.
But if you add in the $60 cost to buy the game and stretch this out over the course of the next 4, 5, 6 years, they will still make a ridiculous profit overall.
So it seems the real story is users getting mad that forum moderators were closing threads giving others the cancellation workaround. I can 100% see why such a thing would be necessary to protect player account security and prevent phishing. Just kind of mad how fast that all bubbled up.
Pachter said this amount of money was to much, probably more then 100 million.
@DaBuddaDa: You forgot to add in the base cost for a game upon purchase, not just the billing.
Man, a Game of Thrones game by BioWare. I would play that. So many incest options.
that's million bucks
And boy have EA betted betted on the wrong horse. Going up against WoW? No way in hell they are making profit from this game ever.
Personally, I think it turned out pretty well, but enough people came into this with (and possibly only because of) unrealistic expectations about how much if would change the MMO formula that I don't know how they'll do. However, @DaBuddaDa: that might be true if you only count subscription costs, but of the initial sale price of 60 bucks, I think I remember Pachter saying they keep 2/3rds. Keeping in mind that many sales are directly through origin and the $60 is not split with a retailer, that is an underestimate. Estimates are that it sold 1.7 million, which equates to 68 million dollars (going with the conservative 2/3rds calculation) so they'd need .73 million subscribers over a year to cover development costs. EA has said they need .5 million to turn a profit. http://www.computerandvideogames.com/332966/old-republic-sales-concerns-are-overblown-pachter/
@Niksis said:
Calculations like these are useless anyway. We don't know how much Bioware recieves per sold game, we don't know what their monthly costs are on the hardware side, etc, etc. Only Bioware knows what's coming in and going out.
That is a boatload of money...but are they done spending? I imagine if they go into developing expansions (and not just patch updates/free content expansions), EA/Bioware could spend a lot more.
I still doubt they'll end up making a real profit on this, but perhaps they'll break even. That's more than I originally expected. I've been surprised by the interest in this game around launch.
And then most people are unsubbing at the end of the free month. Way to waste money EA
Is that amount including marketing as well?
I'm really curious to see what the servers look like today, just not curious enough to actually pay for a month.