User base projected to fall to 1.25 million by March 2013
One of Electronic Arts’ most expensive gambles in its thirty-year history is no longer producing growth in subscriber numbers, according to new analyst data.
Cowen and Company analyst Doug Creutz claims that Star Wars MMO subscription numbers “peaked” in February – at about 1.7 million members. He projects that the number will fall to about 1.25 million subscribers by the end of the current financial year, March 2013.
Electronic Arts has not validated the data, which was estimated via readings of server statistics.
Though estimates on the game’s budget vary wildly, the consensus is that the project cost at least $100 million to develop, promote and publish. It is not known if it is yet yielding a profit, or whether the current subscriber base will bring it out of the red in the current fiscal year.
"We believe that the apparent decline in subscribers is most likely due to a lack of 'end-game' content for the title, meaning that players who hit the level cap have few compelling options in terms of ongoing game play," said Creutz.
Advertisement
"While the game got off to a good start, the relatively light amount of end-game content does appear to be taking a toll."
Electronic Arts and developer Bioware has the capacity to implement such upgrades to the title.
"We believe EA is attempting to address the end-game content issue, including a recent major game update, but momentum appears to have stalled and we believe it is prudent to adopt a more conservative forecast on subscribers at this time,” the Cowen and Company analyst added.
Electronic Arts is performing above industry averages, Creutz added.
I'm sure it's down to people leaving somewhat empty servers more poplated ones, end result being that empty servers become emptier and busy ones become overcrowded. Others just leave because they would rather give up than reroll on another server because EA refuse to offer server transfers, not wanting to have empty servers and loosing face when they close them.
I can't help but feel SWTOR would be doing better if it didn't have an outdated server system and business model. Hopefully they will be made to rethink and go to F2P or another model and consolidate the servers into an instance system similar to Champions.
People just realized that it's the same thing they used to play in all those other MMOs. Yeah the story quests are cool the first time, but the combat, business model, class/skill system, quest system, it's all the same thing over and over with a shiny Star Wars look on it...
I'll be playing the Tera open beta this wekend and GW2's beta next weekend, I really hope these two can live up to the hype !
He might be right with subscriptions because many of them are 90-day/210-day subscriptions and those players left while the subs will be on the books. Like many players who left, I left with time on the books.
However, the play base is far worse because the analyst is using a limited tool. TorStatus is great for seeing the trends, but it's not as accurate as some other third-party statitsical tracking of games because of the way it reports.
There are other third-party user/play-time stats say the population of gamers using those services (which track unique log-ins and play-time) are at less than 40% of the level of mid-January. And only one-third of late-December. Despite another 600K units sold over the January-through-March period.
You can't go from 1.7 million units sold to 2.3 million units sold and have your unique log-ins drop by 60% without there being a mass exodus.
