I wish that were the case, but im afraid it isnt. The facts point to an impending disaster. Im going to use US dollars because we all roughly pay the same.
I think you got the figure of 4m units shifted from the Forbes quoted assessment that came out pre-release. They estimated that by the end of 2012, 3 million units would have been sold with an active subscriber base of 2 million, which would be just fine.
Of course BioWare havent released any sales info. What they have said was that 'over a million gamers' were playing SWTOR over christmas. They went on to say that 850,000 Sith warriors had been created and 810,000 Jedi knights. Given that multiple characters per account were likely, with server queues some migration too, this suggests a figure between one and one-and-a-half million unit sales, because I highly doubt many people bought but didnt activate. I would think it was closer to a million because they would have quoted that number but lets be generous (hopeful) and say thay have added another 300,000 so its 1.3 million.
There is also no info on the cost of developing the game, but various estimates have come out by 'experts' who put the figure at between $125 - $175 million and that hasnt been disputed. Lets split the difference and say it was $150 million.
So to the numbers - 1.3 million people paying $60 = $78 million. 300k people paying $15 per month = $4.5 million per month, $54 million per year. That is bad news in any book. Bioware now has 1000 employees, a couple of hundred of which are CS staff in Ireland. Again, nobody knows the running costs of a MMORPG, but as a guesstimate WoW in its first 4 years cost around $50m per year. If youve made $132m after twelve months, minus substantial running costs, well youre a long way off even beginning to recover dev costs when you were expected to have made at least 4 times that. Also god knows what theyre paying lucas arts for licensing.
Plus theres a lot of trouble ahead holding onto their player base. You've got short term Guild Wars, Diablo 3, Planetside 2, Mists of Pandoria and even Project Titan *possibly* in 2013. A Fallout MMO is also likely to be in the works soon.
Of course this is all conjecture, just based on the numbers that ive seen over the past couple of weeks. We will know for sure pretty quickly, at least in the next couple of months. If any of the above rings true, then without drastic action theyre going to be haemorraging players. Firstly we'll see a drastic reduction in servers, some layoffs. If its still going downhill, the March patch will have some pretty heavy and fundamental changes (if the engine allows). After that they either need to shut down or go Free to Play. That has been known to triple sub income. But the game is no way set up for that, I cannot imagine how they would do it. The worst case scenario is Bioware are dragged under, but who knows how theyve set up development funding - loans have to be paid, other games developed. You cant have SWTOR being a money black hole for the profits from Mass effect and DA. That would be a total tragedy.
Anyway im all doom and gloom. Im off to play, hoping im wrong.
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