SWTOR post-mortem

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No, it's a lot less. There's also retailers and other middle-men who get a huge chunk.

Usually, a game that is being sold for 60 bucks? Something like $27 goes to the publisher, and $5 to the developer.

Isn't Publisher in this case EA?

Yes. But they still have to pay royalities to LA, too. It's certainly not the whole $60 they get back.

But apparently there were enough people trying to buy the $120 deluxe edition that EA's online store ran out of bits to send them, so that might count for something

Advertisement costs are probably pretty massive.

And servers maintenance.

And this guy's double-chin:

MMOs also have significant operational costs. Of those 800 people, a fair amount are still working on the game full-time to implement all these new features the pity video listed. Then you have all the customer service people, the in-game admins, server maintenance, and so forth. If the developers could just pocket all the money they get from subscriptions, Blizzard wouldn't have needed to succumb to the dark side powers of Kotick and would be swimming in their jew gold to this day.

Honestly, if it cost anywhere near what these sources claim, it's almost certainly going to be a commercial failure. Especially since TOR is a mediocre WoW-clone beyond the single-player story gimmick, which isn't something that compels players to come back (which is the whole point of an MMO). I honestly don't understand why anyone thought Bioware, of all development studios, could actually make a successful MMO.

Blizzard got no choice in this merger, since they already were a subsidiary of Vivendi, and Vivendi Games got swallowed by Activision. That was the deal.

Blizzard never needed Activision to operate independently.

Yeah, but it's late, and I couldn't come up with a suitable metaphor for them being unreasonably rich. Which they would be if WoW required no maintenance. But it does, and so does ToR.

Because BioWare jumped in making a MMO before EA acquired then.
I would say the cost overun come from they having no much idea were to go with it and EA forcing Mythic into it, its just reeks of gross mismanagement that started on day 1 and became worst and worst as it moved forward.

As for LucasArts, if I recall they said they would see no royalties until development costs were covered that does make me think the moment EA recovers from losses they will bail out and leave LucasArts holding the bag.

That would be the dumbest agreement ever for them after the failure of the other SW MMO.

I don't see why EA would drop it, after development costs have been recovered they make profit. Even if 20% of that profit goes to Lucas Arts, its still profit and I see no reason why they wouldn't want that.

The unholy trinity of shit:

David Gaider:







George Lucas:





John Riccitiello:




See john? That's the expression he makes about SW:TOR.

Well EA only acquired BioWare in October '07 as "Star Wars MMO" agreement with LucasArts would have been earlier, its annoying to dig up dates about it but there is a interview back from November '06 with James Ohlen and a couple of other people from BioWare Austin about it.

http://www.1up.com/news/bioware-austin-talks-upcoming-mmo

I would say the agreement would date back to '06 and EA only come onboard in late '07.

The agreement is pretty dumb with BioWare Mythic under EA but when done it was BioWare as a independent company, I can see why LucasArts would cut them some slack and make a much better deal ... problem was what come afterwards.

Its about investment/return ratio ... EA inherited the contract when they acquired BioWare and as I suppose they could have drop it but they just thrown money at it, if they dont get a good return ratio on it, they ditch it.

MMO subscribers numbers usually peak at launch and then start a descent, there is always the question of if its not better to use the money on something with higher return rate and you only need to see the history that EA have with MMO, in fact you can just look at WAR ... 1.2 million copies sold at launch, 800,000 registered users, 750,000 subscribers, now its down to 3 servers total.

Because by the time development costs are covered the number of subscribers is likely to be around 125,000 at best, meaning they would be pulling per month around 200,000$ USD (in 2017) so what reason would EA have to stick around 5 years after launch? the money they would be making would hardly be enough to justify keeping the game running.

Worst case they stop making new content and just keep a few servers up. Server costs are ridiculously cheap, its got to be at least 90% profit. Not sure if thats enough to count as "killing" the game in MMO terms though, I wouldn't consider the game dead until servers were shut off entirely.

Nah, it'd count as killing. Warhammer Online was another game that had the exact same thing happen to it, and its been on life-support ever since. It's actually pretty hilarious how adamant EA is about not trying an F2P version of WAR, even if it's a fairly shitty WoW clone it could get some revenue in that way.

Actually, this is a LOT like when WAR tried to take on WoW and only got an epic faceplant. EA cannot into MMOs.

F2P isn't an auto cash flow. You still need to add content to the game and they had no faith in the team. Safer to just keep it on life support.

I don't think the F2P model is gonna survive too, just like any other "trends", it's only gonna thrive for a couple of years before it declines fast. Same shit with this social gaming: It's all about making a fast buck without putting much quality behind the product - that can't go well.

Free 2 Play?

There's nothing free in this world, this can't be sustainable in the long run.

Sure, lazy and untalented people and hipster women who want to enter the industry might find some revenues there, but if you really wanna make a long-term career in the game industry, you have to work your ass up and learn real skills, and work on AAA. Becoming a fag like Molyneux or Miyamoto isn't cutting it anymore these days.

But Triple-A story driven blockbuster games? That's something people always wanna play, they always wanna have the next big blockbuster, no matter of age, gender, conviction or taste - everybody wants to see the next Avatar or Batman or LotR movie. Same with games.

F2P? Good then the Chinks have 1,3 billion people. Some of those must be stupid enough to pay you for hats and new weapons and shit. But it is ultimately only about the money-making first without any consideration for quality. This is why oldfag Morgoth disapproves of F2P.

F2P is the model for games made on the cheap, released well before they are content complete and then they continue to develop as revenue trickles in. It's a relatively lower risk business model, and because of the low price of entry the game has a much greater chance of catching on and maintaining a sustainable player base, unlike sub games which can implode much more easily.

But all that good stuff it still damages gameplay in some pretty intrusive ways.

Similarly, Champions Online does so too. After going F2P, both the player count and revenue of CO jumped by 1000%, and last year, it's first F2P year, it has had more content updates than the previous two years combined. Lion's share of new powers, costumes and quests were introduced after F2P.

The crippled MMO won an award from cripples

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/01/21/swtor-receives-ablegamers-accessible-mainstream-goty-award/

Accessible Mainstream GOTY award

Lmao.

Oh man that's gotta be the most hilarious GOTY award ever.

Some very eye-opening material here if you're interested in the poor performance aspect of SW:TOR's engine:

http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/heroengine-meets-starwars/

Make sure to read the comments, too.