Market Analyst Claims SWTOR Has Reached Its Peak Subcribers

Written by: Ryan Verniere (@Shaddoe) | April 19, 2012 7:00 pm

67 Comments

Cowen and Company, a financial services firm, went on record stating that 1.7 million would be the peak number of subscriptions for Star Wars: The Old Republic then continued by saying that by the end of EA‘s fiscal year — March 2013 — the game will have 1.25 million subscribers.

The firm’s Analyst Doug Creutz derives these numbers form the server status tracking site TORStatus.com. In February, BioWare announced that the subscribers equaled to 1.7 million; however, it never made it clear when this stat was taken. It is also unclear how Creutz came up with the number 1.25 million based on a site that deals with server loads not individual subscribers nor even the specific number of players on a given server.

Lack of endgame content was pointed out as being the biggest rationale for why the numbers have slowed. In an article on Gamasutra, Cruetz is quoted as saying, “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.”

We are not marketing analysts here, and Cruetz might be completely right. However, the source of his information might be nothing more than his personal impressions of the game itself.

Market Analyst Claims SWTOR Has Reached Its Peak Subcribers

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http://www.facebook.com/people/Cameron-Nichols/1439876044 Cameron Nichols

is it just me or is the audio always out of sync on Mike S. videos?
- HarmonBlues
  
  The audio isn’t out of sync with Mike S.
  
  Mike S. is out of sync IRL. His voice never waits up for his lips! That’s why he works on GameBreaker. This way he could blend in and pass the issue off as simple media async. XD
  - Jado Cast
    
    Now that’s just mean! :-)
    - HarmonBlues
      
      D: XD
- Jado Cast
  
  Happens to me too.
http://twitter.com/ZodiacMeteor ZodiacMeteor

Monster Hunter Tri is so much fun!

I predict will it hold it’s online number till 2013, OH WAIT.
Michael McGee

Those people making those projections just hate the game and are trying to scare people into not buying it or scaring people to cancel their subs

SWTOR is having more success than WoW did in it’s first year

The analysts were wrong about WoW and now WoW has 11 million subs

SWTOR will probably not get that high but if Bioware does things correctly then SWTOR should reach 3 million subs by Jan 2013

I’m an analyst who has a masters in Economic Analysis and that is my projection
- Jay Nielson
  
  I don’t need to have a business degree to see that subs are way down… Do you follow the republic show? I would love to hear how many hours the hosts actually still play. Have you checked taugrim’s stream lately? Honestly when GW2, D3, and MoP hits they will be lucky to have 500k subs. Not coming out w/ rated bg’s and offering a free 30 days because they are begging for subs just makes it look worse.
  
  Comparing this to wow is just plain silly… Go back and read some of your stats books imo. There was a much smaller mmo/game market and they’ve become much more mainstream.
  
  Sorry if this came across strongly but even fanboi’s must wake from the star wars dream eventually. Tor will be around for a long time, but it’s seen it’s 15 mins of fame.
  - Haze4peace
    
    I agree, WoW was a case of a good product coming out at the exact right time. SWTOR came out in a semi-crowded market place and it is only going to get more crowded. IMO there will be no more huge MMOs that take 60-70% market share anymore. Every good MMO will have its fanbase and in all reality this will only help the MMO genre evolve in the long run.
  - Damir Miric
    
    Over the past few days I logged on to my server and there were at peak times 10 people on the fleet on both sides. It used to be like 200 on rep 300+ on imp side. I know for a fact that most of those people quit the game and havent made a char on a new server because at that point it was not needed there were plenty of people. It was one of those servers you had to stay for an hour in a queue for some times..
    
    Also it takes 20 min to get in to pvp when you first log in because theres just 1 match and usualy that match is missing 2-3 people first 4-5 mins of the match, To get a FP grp is imposible. Queue for pvp used to be like 1 second.
    
    Judging things by tor status looks pretty reliable. Its not a problem at all to do /who on a lite server and check how many people are actualy there. And then on few standard servers and so on. By the end you will have pretty accurate number what lite and standard mean.
    
    Their graphs show that lite is up to 100 people and standard is up to 200. And they are not showing below 100 because I know for a fact that from like 5am to 10am theres like 1 person on both sides split in half on my server. 200 people in total could be overal awerage ofc on both sides. But I frankly dont think so.
    
    Free week brought like 2-3 people back to my server.
    
    To make my point 1.2m subs dosent feel very realistic to me because if they had 1.7 at peak and now it declined for alot as you can see then 1.2 dosent seem true. Unless ofc people are just paying and not playing.
    
    On a personal note I’m sorry that game failed but it failed. I had 2-3 fun months but I lost interest because of a very bad disbalance in PvP and because there was nobody to play with.
    
    Maybe when they make chross server pvp and rated pvp and make new balancing changes I will come back unless I get so much absorbed in to GW2 that I will forget about SWTOR.
    
    Sorry about the wall of text
  - http://www.facebook.com/djlanders020 Dave Landers
    
    This reminds me of poor Vanguard (which could have been a phenomenal game).. It was released too early with too little content. When the mass exodus started, Vanguard tried to entice people to stay by offering free stuff and tons of double xp weekends. That tactic failed for them. It will probably be the same for SWTOR.
    … but, honestly, who can say for sure?
- http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
  
  Just reviewed the “vanilla” wow subscription numbers, at the end of their first full year of WOW, there were over 5 million subscribers.
  
  Is BW releasing SWTOR To any additional new markets for the rest of the year? I don’t see them increasing their subscriber base from the existing markets.
  
  Seeing a lot of articles discussing how long will it take for SWTOR to be profitable.
  - Darth_Matter
    
    WoWs numbers were a lot closer to 2 million in their first year…. which is pretty close to 1.7 million……
    
    Go to Ten Ton Hammer and look for the article “Do Subscription Numbers a Succes or Failure Make?”.
    
    Keep in mind that just as companies will pay for positive press for their game, so will the competitors pay for negative press for other games. Its all part of marketing. The honest truth is that ToR launched with higher numbers than WoW and has around the same number of subscribers that they had a year after launch. Does that guarantee success in the long run? No but it does mean that ToR is a healthy MMO and anything is possible.
    
    Also, some people mentioned that their servers are feeling really light lately, the population on our fleet at any given time as more than doubled since 1.2. I know what being on a light pop server is like. I was on a WoW server that completely died after server transfers were implemented and had to much invested on that server to just move. It made me feel like the game was dying and I started losing hope of having fun until I got on a higher pop server and realized that it wasn’t the game that was letting me down but that I should have been smart enough to move to a higher population server earlier.
    - http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
      
      Re-read the article. It states 2 million subscribers by mid 2005 and 6 million subscribers by 2006. Review the chart attached to the article. Also, take a look at the chart line for WoW East (assuming that is China) and WoW west. They seem to indicate by the end of 2005 US/EU(?) was 2.5 million and WoW East was closer to 3.5 million, leading to the 6 million subscribers by 2006.
      
      While the TOR launch was hugh at 2 million, It would be a big suprise to see an additional 3 million box sales by the end of the year.
      - Darth_Matter
        
        WoW launched November 23, 2004 and mid 2005 would be around June so we are only talking a matter of 3 months. So 3 months shy of a year, WoW had 2 million subscribers. ToR came out of the gate with 1.7 million subscribers. ToR launched in December so that means that if patch 1.2 pulls in 300,000 then they exactly match WoWs numbers for the first year. Which is the largest MMO in history.
        
        Keep in mind that ToR was launched in the East late and has not released those numbers yet so the 1.7 million subscribers will be higher when those numbers are tallied in.
      - ChristopherMitchell1
        
        So first of all, are you really going to compare the recent launch of a game to a game that is almost 8 years old? WoW released when MMOs were still considered a ‘niche’ genre. Compared to today, the market has grown 10 times what it was then. Not to mention the SW IP is the most successful IP for like the last 30 years and that alone (not the game) is what gave SWTOR that large launch number. On top of this, as far as server population goes, you say that your server pop doubled and that is a common occurence RIGHT AFTER A MAJOR CONTENT PATCH! Give it 3-4 weeks after everyones FREE GAME TIME runs out and then you can start talking about server pop again.
        
        I don’t care for WoW or SWTOR but I just had to point out some major flaws in your ‘comparison’ that you conveniently left out…
      - Darth_Matter
        
        No. Im comparing a launch and then growth percentage for the first year of a successful MMO and then comparing it to another launch and what can turn out to be a successful MMO in the long run. We can sit around and discuss growth percentage of the market as a whole and how it has impacted the perception of what consumers consider a successful MMO and an unsuccessful one but my point wasn’t to say that ToR will be another WoW in 8 years. It was to say that there is another way of looking at the numbers that can be perceived as positive toward the future of the game by drawing a comparison to the launch of a game that no one can argue was successful in the long run. As far as me saying that Ive seen growth on my server. My experience has just as much validity as the plethora of people who have claimed that their server population has seen major decline yet I haven’t seen you replying to them to tell them that their negative view point may be relative to their experience in the game and may not reflect on the game population as a whole. Your prediction of seeing a subscription lose in 3-4 weeks is only conjecture at this point so I wont bother responding to that until your time frame is up.
        
        The future of ToR has yet to be seen. Positive or negative. Anyone saying they “know” otherwise is simply guessing based on their own wants and has nothing to do with reality.
      - ChristopherMitchell1
        
        Except I have no ‘wants’ on the subject. I don’t care how SWTOR fairs. But your ‘comparison’ was flawed and your little wall of text doesn’t fix that for yourself. Plus, my supposed ‘conjecture’ isn’t conjecture at all. Half of the players on the servers atm are probably on for free and a lot of them are not going to resub just because they got some free time in the game. That’s what happens when games give players that left free time, you see an insurgence of population and as soon as the time ends only a percentage actually stay with the game. Your server may be the one where all the people who are still subbed ended up, who knows.
      - http://www.facebook.com/djlanders020 Dave Landers
        
        WoW had a lot less competition than SWTOR does, too.. All WoW had to compete with was EverQuest. SWTOR has a dozen other games to compete with.
        I agree with your overall assessment, but it seems kind of silly to compare release of SWTOR in 2012 to release of any other game seven years ago. The MMO world is so much different now…
      - Darth_Matter
        
        According to wikipedia, games already out in 2004 when WoW came out were:
        
        Ultima Online
        Lineage
        Anarchy Online
        Runescape
        Dark Age of Camelot
        Star Wars Galaxies
        Lineage II
        Everquest
        Eve Online
        
        Then within the first year of their release we had:
        
        City of Heroes
        Everquest II
        Guild Wars
        City of Villains
        
        WoW rose over it’s competition and was able to launch much more successfully than what was out in the market at the time. ToR has done the same thing by making history for the largest launch in video game history. Again, Im not saying that SWTOR will be another WoW. WoW brought a lot of people to MMOs that had no interest in them before. Which also made the market much larger than it was in the beginning of 2004. No one is arguing that.
        
        BUT ToR is the second largest MMO in the US and Europe. It’s larger than Rift, Eve, Guild Wars, etc. That seems pretty successful to me. When they release the subscription numbers in the East as well then we can get an idea of how it is doing globally.
        
        I would like to see how Guild Wars 2 and Tera do but I doubt they will pull even close to the numbers that ToR has.
      - ChristopherMitchell1
        
        I would looooove to see your source for SWTOR having the biggest launch in history. And even if they did, Star Wars is the biggest thing since…. Star Wars. Slap that IP on something and you can bet your ass there is going to be a fan base for it even if they don’t know what it is.
        
        Also, EVE can’t be put in the same category and Guild Wars is again 7+ years old so cannot be compared. WoW is the only mmo that has grown the longer it was out. That could be ending but 10 million subs will still take awhile to disperse even if they do fall. Rift was a completely new IP and was a very polished standard mmo just like SWTOR but again SWTOR is newer than Rift and has an unbeatable IP.
        
        Yet, that is the problem isn’t it. It was just another standard mmo with no real inovation. Fully voiced cut scenes instead of quest text stays fresh only so long and isn’t so much innovation as a sign of a large game budget. I wish it wasn’t so but like someone else has said, SWTOR is just WoW with lightsabers which may be amazing for some people but not most.
      - Darth_Matter
        
        Go to PC Gamer and look for an article titled, ‘The Old Republic is “the fastest growing subscription MMO in history,” has 1.7 million subscribers’.
        
        Eve came out months before WoW and has shown stable unbroken growth at least up until last Jan when I stopped keeping up with it. That means its had 8 years of solid subscription growth while having come out the same year as WoW. Guild Wars launched only months after WoW was initally launched and all of their success as an MMO was at the exact same time as WoW became successful.
        
        Just in case you missed it. Im comparing games that came out within months of WoW and showing that they are considered successful MMOs now. They competed with WoW when the game was brand new. So WoW did have a lot of competition at it’s launch exactly the same as ToR does. Both games launched very well. We have yet to see how ToR will match up in the long run but at the moment there is no sign to say that the game has done even remotely bad.
        
        Star Wars is an unbeatable IP?!? LMAO Star Wars Galaxies came out only months before WoW yet SWG didnt have near the success that WoW did. I guess Warcraft is the true unbeatable IP which makes ToR’s success that much more incredible!!!
      - ChristopherMitchell1
        
        More like Galaxies failed but star wars fanes made it last up until SWTOR release. If you remember correctly Galaxies still had running servers until a few months before SWTOR…. And EVE doesn’t count because it does not fit the same category as other games is what I was saying if you failed to catch that. The arcticle was misleading since SWTOR ‘PEAKED’ at 1.7 mil subs not that it has 1.7 mil subs and still growing. Subs are actually falling after it hit a peak. Herp some more derp pls.
      - http://twitter.com/dularr Dularr
        
        This discussion in a SWTOR article, really shows how truly amazing the numbers were for “vanilla” WoW.
        
        Even the launch of TOR and WoW expansions 24 hour sales are telling.
        2 Million - Star Wars: The Old Republic
        3.3 Million - World of Warcraft: Cataclysm
        2.8 Million - World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
        2.4 Million - World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade
- pc11
  
  I feel sorry for the money you spent on that Masters and whoever employs you because you are completly clueless.
  
  No point going to detail as to why since there are already 3-4 detailed replies to your arsed opinon.
  
  Also, all your facts are wrong. SWTOR will never reach WOWs first year numbers and WOW came out at a time where there was no mass market for MMOs (7 years ago). Did you learn to compare 2012 country GNP with 1912 in your Masters?
  
  SWTOR did not bring any innovation to a market that is now competitive meaning it has no market advantage apart from the strong SW IP. This means they will be a niche product and 1 million subs in 2013 sounds optimistic to me.
  
  The MMO pricing model is at a strong changing point and SWTOR is using an outdated model. Free-to-play + microtransactions and buy-game-to-play will be the only options going forward. People may like SWTOR but will not pay every month to log in a couple a days.
http://www.facebook.com/rammur65 Roger Means

i really can careless about number i like to play my games not study the economics behind them.
- http://www.facebook.com/toph1980 Christopher Fischer
  
  You will care when you can’t find anybody to play with lol
ChristopherRuscoe

and as they can make wild guess i will do the say and say they this firm is talking out its ass and what do you know it is talking out its ass, the only way this will happen is if they scear the hell out of infesters so they force it to happen.

CWR
- Avaloner31
  
  I think if they did not know what they where talking about they would not last long in the finacial world. Still people predicted WOW would flop before it was released so meh.
Bluecewe

TORStatus.net or TORStatus.com?
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_R35J5EUERGS3E6JRIQMBCDTRRY Nathan I

”
However, the source of his information might be nothing more than his personal impressions of the game itself.”

Let’s see here, that article says:

- Prediction: BF3 looks good. Fact: It is, most people think it’s a good game. Sales are good.

- Prediction: Saint’s row the Third looks good. Fact: It is, most people think it’s a good game. Sales are good.

- Prediction: Spyro will make big bucks. Fact: They have and will continue to do so, it is very much a runaway hit.

- Prediction: SWTOR will miss the 2011 release date. Fact: SWTOR barely made the 2011 release date and was released in what many people consider an incomplete state.

So basically, this guy has proven that he knows what he’s talking about.
Jado Cast

I don’t understand the compulsion to root for a game to fail. Americans have this competitive streak that goes too far sometimes. Why do we have to tear something down, or suggest something is failing or predict failure just because we don’t like it. I don’t get it. Red State/Blue State, Coke/Pepsi, Taste Great/Less Filling, BF3/CoD, SWTOR/WoW, Tera/GW2, it’s just silly. It’s like we have to divide ourselves, and we do it with games all the time. It’s almost oxy-moronic that we call our country the United States anymore. Except for 911, I don’t think we’ve been united much in the past 20 years. The Media and Evil Intranets don’t help either.

I’m a huge Star Wars fan since 1977, and I thought KOTOR was a great game, but I could tell I would not like SWTOR and didn’t buy it. The beta was not to my liking, but I didn’t go out and tell everybody how bad it is, and that I hope it fails. I’m not a WoW fan, but I don’t wish it to die.

Now I read similar discussions about TERA and GW2 and how they are great or going to fail and one is better than the other. Who Cares? We should just play them if you like them, and don’t if you don’t. Or am I missing something, and just don’t get it?
- ChristopherMitchell1
  
  I think you just don’t get it lol, everyone that uses the internet has their asshat switched turned on. Me, personally, find myself having to correct people’s stupid even tho I should just ignore it but my asshat switch is on so I must respond and try to correct their failure to society… This is all in my head of course… I’m right you’re wrong so there!
  - Jado Cast
    
    Ahh, so I need to get an asshat switch. I don’t have one of those, thanks for the info! LOL
- http://twitter.com/SallyBowls Sally Bowls
  
  It is mostly that people are negative jerks but there are business reasons.
  
  1) Economists call it “network effect” – as things get more valuable the more people you have, the business tend to condense into one. I.e., it is more useful to have 100 million on facebook than 50 facebook, 50 myspace Social networks tend to consolidate to the winner. If WoW is more valuable to me the more of my friends are on it, then the more people join, the more valuable so the more new people join ….
  
  2) The amount of developer resources grows non-linearly with subscribers. So if say a million people left WoW for Rift, then rift could justify more than twice as many developers. So if you play game X then in you would benefit if people left Game W and came to X.
  
  In the long term, competition is good. In the short term, I benefit if every other MMO I don’t play were to fail.
  - Jado Cast
    
    Sally, that’s very interesting. Thanks for the info.
  - http://twitter.com/imortispha Yndras
    
    That is idiotic. You are asuming that if people dont play X mmo, they then must play Y. When in reality they just dont play anything.
    
    Your logic requires all participants to need to play a mmo. This just isnt the case.
    - ChristopherMitchell1
      
      Um… I’m pretty sure she is talking about mmo players… and what makes mmo players, well, mmo players? Oh right, they play MMOs! If one MMO PLAYER decides they don’t want to play a certain mmo anymore they will most likely switch to something else. Or if they think they want to try a different game they usually leave the one they are currently playing. IT’S WHAT MAKES US MMO PLAYERS!!!
      
      Before you spew the word ‘idiotic’ you may want to check who you are pointing that finger at
- http://twitter.com/Pross182 Pross182
  
  It’s the negative side of word of mouth. I don’t like the game but I never railed against people I know that do. Yet if someone asks my opinion on the game I’m going to tell them that I didn’t like it which affects their opinion on buying or not. The same way good word of mouth increases game sales, bad word of mouth reduces it. It’s free market my friend.
Revanhavoc

I don’t think subscription numbers define the success/failure of an MMO to the subjective viewer.

What defines their impression of success/failure is a myriad of bias due to loyalty toward other games, distaste/admiration for developers or publishers, and player experiences, direct or indirect.

This makes objectively analyzing a game’s success a tricky mental balancing act…Which leads us back to subscription numbers. I find subscription numbers both efficient, and yet unimaginative when defending a game’s success.

In the end, I don’t care if you think 1.25 million subs is loads, and that defines success.

They failed me – me personally as a fan since 2008 – and so the game to me is a failure.

Great discussion and I love when you guys break out the business talk.
- Jay Nielson
  
  I agree w/ the “They failed me,” idea. That’s exactly how I feel. The idea that many of the things from 1.2 should of been in at launch is just another frustration. We’re comparing it to other games lets look at warhammer. Game had huge hype also, and out of the gates had tons of people sub to it. It also had tons of issues and the problem is the issues were not fixed till months later and by that time the train had left the station.
  
  Again we’re not saying swtor’s going to end by the end of this year. We’re saying it’s had it’s time and the next big thing is about to come out.
- http://twitter.com/imortispha Yndras
  
  What did you want that you didn’t get? A single game can never fufill your wildest dreams. This is the delision many players entered with.
http://www.facebook.com/chaz.rpg Chaz Davis

EA voted worst company in america, rumors spreading around about layoffs, some analysts says something negative about swtor and everyone takes it and runs with it, this seems to be a smear campaign more than anything else.

I know EA ruined some franchises like C&C but is that really the worst america has to offer? maybe worst gaming company, but even that’s dabatable, AVGN would say that the worst was LJN.

People seem to confuse a decline in population with a decline in subscribers, there are a lot of players that play on the weekends or in the evenenings. When the game launched everyone was playing 12hs a day, they took days off work, etc. Now you see less players on the fleet because they are playing less hours per day.
http://www.facebook.com/clint.casey1 Charles Clint Casey

The driving force behind stock prices is Market Demand, which is basically how much people are willing to pay for the stock to buy it. Stocks in general are one of the most volatile markets in the world.

There are lots of factors that go into determining what people are willing to pay for stocks and in EA’s case the contributor to the recent stock downturn is speculation of declining revenues leading to decreased earnings per share.

At the moment we don’t know how much of the information known is true.

When will we know? Next Month. Ea’s next quarterly investor report will be in May, either in the 1st or 2nd week. EA is a publicly traded company so federal law says that they have show investors and the general public exactly what is going on with their company, so we should expect some detailed reports next month.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael-Johnson/1353890372 Michael Johnson

I just got an email that says if I resub to SWTOR before April 22nd I get a free month…
And then I saw this article…

And laughed
- Jay
  
  LOL I laughed before I saw the article.
http://www.facebook.com/people/You-Lilphucker/100003567602561 You Lilphucker

1.25 million is being generous, SWTOR is tanking. I can remember Larry saying SWTOR was going to launch with 4 million people, sorry but I can’t put much faith in a fan boy when it comes to this.
- Ryan Mercer
  
  Yea, Larry is too much of a fanboy to really be able to trust anything he says about SWTOR. I like him as a person, but he is FAR from objective.
  - http://www.facebook.com/toph1980 Christopher Fischer
    
    Ofc SWTOR is tanking, they currently have 1.3 million active subscribers including everybody on their free month. I’m 99.9% sure SWTOR will have less than 1 million subscribers by August.
    - http://www.facebook.com/briangermain1 Brian Germain
      
      even if they drop to 600k subs thats still on par with something like eve that has been around for years.
http://twitter.com/greencactaur green cactaur

I’m confused what did the guys expect? 2million? 3million? to kill WoW? if so they must be insane. to be honest if I was part of a p2p game company i’d expect to peek at 200k. 1million subscribers it phenomenal. Is it going to drop from here? absolutely, but what were they expecting…
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael-Johnson/1353890372 Michael Johnson
  
  They expected it to keep growing throughout the first year
  The poured untold amount of money into it, used the Star Wars IP, used the Bioware name, and had it’s hype at a level beyond any game in history.
  
  EA threw every single angle at SWTOR, they used the biggest guns they had and they STILL can’t get it past 1.7 million.
  
  And now they’re giving out a free month if you resub before April 22nd
  - http://twitter.com/imortispha Yndras
    
    If this is considered a failure, that can only be bad for the mmo industry as a whole as if their is no return of investment in a market, the market will die.
    - http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael-Johnson/1353890372 Michael Johnson
      
      Because a world without MMOs would be SO terrible right?
      
      You mean companies WON’T shoehorn every IP into a WoWclone?
      OH NO WHAT WILL WE DO?!
http://twitter.com/imortispha Yndras

I tend to agree with your comment above “However, the source of his information might be nothing more than his personal impressions of the game itself.”

I fail to see how you can get subscription numbers from server load status’ of heavey medium or light. All this shows is active concurrent users. Yes concurrent users have dropped off, but this is expected as people get into a gaming routine and are not longer playing 8-15hours per day.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Jason-Mueller/100000004327864 Jason Mueller

Bioware did NOT over hype their game they told us exactly what was going to be in the game. Never made 1 premise of a feature that did NOT make it into game launch. The people who “over hyped” swtor was the FANS. It was the fans that wanted a “WoW killer”. Bioware did not say it was going to be the next big thing only that it would be fun and it is.

It is the FANS who expect perfection right out of the box on every MMO. They got this idea in their head that WoW is perfect yet every patch day is basically down for that day fixing bugs in the patch. It is the FANS who get a game in their heads of what they want and if they can’t push the game in the direction they want it to go in then its suddenly crap. If you guys keep these stupidly high expectation up NO GAME NOT EVEN THE GREAT GW2 WILL LIVE UP TO YOUR EXPECTATIONS.

Drop this silly idea that MMOs should be bug free at launch as NO GAME IN HISTORY has been bug free. Just find a game you like and play it. Don’t go looking for a game you think is going to bow to your wishes because its not going to happen.

SWTOR was exactly what I thought it would be, because I read only what Bioware released and not what some FAN wrote would be in the game. I got into beta for about 6 months before the release and am still playing it and will keep playing it. GW2 has some nice ideas but there are things that concern me in that game that may make it not play how people think its going to work.
- ChristopherMitchell1
  
  You’re right, I was excited when SWTOR was first announced but the more and more info that came out about it the less and less I thought it was going to be good. And now I’m glad I had my head on straight and passed it over since it was not going to be a game I enjoyed. Maybe if they released with everything that was included in patch 1.2 and real competitive pvp I would have tried it, but there is no second ‘launch’ for mmos (arguably if they go F2P tho) and I have moved on to other things…
  - http://www.facebook.com/people/Jason-Mueller/100000004327864 Jason Mueller
    
    1.2 wasn’t a 2nd launch it was a patch to put in a feature they did not feel was ready for release. Just look to the PVP section of ilum and you will see what happens when you push something out when it is NOT ready.
    
    Just remember that NO game is going to be released perfect not even GW2. Granted GW2 is going to be F2P when it comes out it does not mean everything is going to be free. They will have you pay for something in the game be it some buff or some huge content update. I am not a fan of the F2P model because all too often is “pay to win”. I know GW2 is going to avoid that “pay to win” but at the same time if you don’t have something big to buy then they won’t make money and the game will shut down.
    - ChristopherMitchell1
      
      Funny that you fail to see that this model has worked just fine before… oh yeah in GW1. Ignorance is not a virtue my friend. And you should probably know, ‘second launch’ doesn’t actually mean it launched for a second time >.> We all know it was a ‘patch’ but it was a patch with content that even the devs said should have been in at launch. In these circumstances we use the coined term ‘second launch’
      - http://www.facebook.com/briangermain1 Brian Germain
        
        and GW1 sucked. You know why people played it? because it was freeto play just like starwars is now. The difference Star wars is far superior to guild wars 1 and only slightly superior to gw2. Gw2 dropped not long after swtor causing numbers to dip in what I considered expected ways if you look at the number swtor still has had higher numbers than gw1, gw2, eve online, and pretty much anything else out there. Remember even wow didn’t have a million right out of the gate. but Star Wars did.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael-Johnson/1353890372 Michael Johnson
  
  So I just dreamed the SWTOR event where they hired hundreds of people to have a massive lightsaber fight below a giant 100 foot tall SWTOR billboard IN THE MIDDLE OF TIMES SQUARE?!?
  - http://www.facebook.com/people/Jason-Mueller/100000004327864 Jason Mueller
    
    So all advertising is over hyping a product? All that was, was a very creative way to get people to take notice in a game that was coming out soon. Ads of any time is not over hyping its just a way for you to take notice of the product.
    
    Did any of those actors say that SWTOR is going to be the greatest thing ever? nope, because that would be over hyping. It was the fans of the game saying it was the greatest MMO that was going to be released and probably be the “WoW killer”.
    - http://profile.yahoo.com/ADEN6X6TYCORSSGEHKWMBIHDHY Eclipse
      
      They definitely overhyped their game and don’t you dare try to place the blame squarely on fans.
      
      First of all TOR and BW went the very opposite direction to build hype that GW2 and ANET are doing. TOR and BW released very, very small bits of information separated by weeks and months. For entire months we would get nothing but lame answerless Q&A’s or pictures of walls, or walls of text describing how their maps were created. All this did was spurn on a want for REAL information on the game, amidst CGI trailers and Dallas Dickison’s static flashpoint walkthroughs.
      
      I still remember the developer blog from years ago talking about how TOR was going to walk the “centrist” path between SandBox and Themepark. The game couldn’t be more Disney World if they tried. While Disney World definitely attracts tons of people every year – how long do they stay and how many times do they return?
      
      As opposed to GW2 and ANET where before even pre-purchases were announced we have HOURS and HOURS and HOURS of in-game footage (not filler CGI trailers mind you) and entire 2 hour long detailed Reddit Q&A’s that answer specific pin-pointed questions.
      
      While both games are hella hyped – that’s for sure – their respective hypes are completely different. TOR’s hype was based on “what could be” veiled behind BW’s bits and pieces of info, which we had to beg for vs GW’s hype which is completely organic and natural, spurred on by people seeing what the game is like and saying “WOW that’s amazing, I want to play that!”
      
      There is even an individual on YT who has a “GW2 Daily” series. You know why he can afford to make a video *every* day? It’s because we have knowledge of the game – while we haven’t played it yet we can watch it being played and we can see it with our own eyes.
      - http://www.facebook.com/chaz.rpg Chaz Davis
        
        Are you insane, man? swtor not showing in-game footage? They have been showing in-game as early as 2008 and they’ve been giving us information for 3 years until they released, of course there was not going to be fresh info every single week.
      - http://profile.yahoo.com/ADEN6X6TYCORSSGEHKWMBIHDHY Eclipse
        
        Not *nearly* to the amount that GW2 has done. As I said we have HOURS AND HOURS AND HOURS of in-game footage from GW2.
        
        From 2008 the only things we were getting was about 10 seconds of alpha footage of some Sith Warrior fighting a slug.
        
        ^^^ NOT THE SAME THING ^^^
      - http://www.facebook.com/chaz.rpg Chaz Davis
        
        Ok, so it was a Lie that swtor ONLY showed cinematics and you had to backpedal.
        
        Bioware probably uploaded around 70 videos before launch, a lot of them with in-game footage like the class trailers, dev walkthrough and so on, plus you have all the demos that people played at conventions plus, you have all the beta weekends that were avaiable (I was invited to three myself) sure we were not allowed upload videos from beta ourselves, but with the Embargo Lift alot of gaming sites were uploading videos and stuff, those are HOURS worth of gameplay too.
        
        Plus if you really wanted to see more there sites like Betacake, Alterswtor, all the famous tester Q&A and lets not forget when the NDA was lifted, everybody and their mother was streaming swtor non stop.
        
        Sorry pal, trying to promote your game by trash talking other games is pretty dumb and childish if you ask me, better luck next time.
http://twitter.com/cipero Matt Cipriano

Why can’t we just enjoy shit anymore? That’s how games used to be back in the day. You bought a game and you played it if you liked it, you didn’t play it if you hated it. I think what turns everything into this bicker festival of satanic b.s. is the monthly sub fee’s. For instance, AN is doing it RIGHT. Releasing GW2 FULLY HYPED and ready to blow your freaking minds out with NO subscription fee. Buy the game, you got the game. And guess what? If by some chance they tank their balls off they won’t have to worry about losing subs because there are none..people who like it will still play it. And….yea that’s how it should be. As for ToR, well..you should’ve had a freaking dungeon que, i don’t care if you want to be like wow or not be like wow…this shit is mmo 101, capeesh?

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