Originally posted by Atlan99

 

Did you check out the link?

There revenue has been steadily increasing. They have cut costs and finally started to push digital.

I don't think  you truly grasp how big EA is. You point at one title and say fail. You don't understand EA can have multiple failures and still make lots of money. They have so many streams of income coming in.

Like I said, their revenue is up because it's hard to lose even more money than they have. A few quarters ago, they reported a loss of 1 billion dollars. OF COURSE they're going to see a gain eventually.

They cut costs by firing staff that failed to meet their unrealistic expectations and gauging customers as much as humanly possible. And let's not forget the 600 MILLION dollar buy-back they used to save their stock from tumbling even further.

EA is litteraly trying to buy their way into success with their overinflated marketing budget. You don't see ads for Steam do you? Yet i see ads EVERYWHERE for EAs Origin. And despite that titanic marketing budget, EA still manages to come up short next to the competition.

It takes a special kind of corporation to spend so much on marketing that they can't possibly make up for it with box sales.

Well maybe not special. Maybe ignorant and bumbling would be better terms.

Originally posted by SumterSide

Originally posted by Atlan99

 

Did you check out the link?

There revenue has been steadily increasing. They have cut costs and finally started to push digital.

I don't think  you truly grasp how big EA is. You point at one title and say fail. You don't understand EA can have multiple failures and still make lots of money. They have so many streams of income coming in.

Like I said, their revenue is up because it's hard to lose even more money than they have. A few quarters ago, they reported a loss of 1 billion dollars. OF COURSE they're going to see a gain eventually.

They cut costs by firing staff that failed to meet their unrealistic expectations and gauging customers as much as humanly possible. And let's not forget the 600 MILLION dollar buy-back they used to save their stock from tumbling even further.

EA is litteraly trying to buy their way into success with their overinflated marketing budget. You don't see ads for Steam do you? Yet i see ads EVERYWHERE for EAs Origin. And despite that titanic marketing budget, EA still manages to come up short next to the competition.

It takes a special kind of corporation to spend so much on marketing that they can't possibly make up for it with box sales.

Well maybe not special. Maybe ignorant and bumbling would be better terms.

I agree, BUT EA will never die. Their sports games alone make up for any loses they could come by in their other gaming mishaps. (what other company truly makes sports games that people buy? not many...and the same people keep buying the sports games year in and out, even though the content is the same.)

The big thing I am worried about with EA is that they are a virtual Midas. Buying out smaller developers only to end up making those franchises stagnant and inevitably dead. I really worry that Crysis 3 won't live up to their hype.

I also wish that those smaller developers would have the balls to take a stand when they get bought out and not sellout in the process (a good example of a dev with balls was Bungie, who demanded their own offices, own hiring/firing, etc from Microsoft, which Microsoft had never allowed to any other group they bought out.)

Originally posted by Burntvet

And gameplay aside, I think GW2 will sell a lot of boxing because of their pricing model.

 

As a base for example:

SWTOR sold 2.4M boxes at launch.

NCSoft recently reported they have already sold 3.12M boxes of GW2 - and that is just pre-purchase with no release date set beyond sometime in 2012. Based on their reports, they expect to sell somewhere around 5M-6M units by launch.

On the topic of the OP:

It is obvious to those of us who play regularly that the number of active players is probably sitting around the 250k-400k mark. However, EA will make adjustments (as they have already done) and explore other business models (first with the fortchcoming trial to sub conversion, then potentially F2P) to make the game profitable on an on-going basis. This will simply mean a slow down in content releases.

The game still suffers from a unique perspective of tunnel vision and arrogance on the part of the current designers. They refuse to believe that their actions are what has resulted in the big sub loss (a good example was the major class changes in patch 1.2 that caused a lot of players to leave). They continue to do really stupid things in an effort to keep people playing. Things such as two months of grinding dailies to get enough commedations to get a set of Level 14 companions gear for alts that obsoletes in four or five levels. Adding a boss in the latest HM flashpoint (LD-14) that requires full columi/rakata gearing to take on only to drop a piece of columi gear (really, you are dropping the gear that is already required to have for the encounter?). These is just two examples of the stuff making no sense whatsoever and each patch is introducing more of this tunnel vision design decisions. This is the stuff threatening the survival of the game. Until EA/BW decides to put head designers who actually understand the MMO space and can get their collective egos out of their backsides, the slide will continue. You can already see the signs of further sub losses coming just from the feedback on 1.3 on the PTS server. Similar feedback was given on 1.2 which was patently dismissed by the lead designers as they knew better, in their almighty opinions, than the players.

As for the other posts calling the game a failure it was a dismal failure when compared to EAs expectations. In 2008 the president of EA stated that they expected to gain a number of subs equal to WoW at the time - 11M subs. BW tried to lower those expectations, but they had been set. Also, there have been numerous sources citing the $200M development estimate - unfortunately, most of that investment went into the VOs, which while good, made a whole lot of the rest of the game suffer. So that was another point of failure.

In the end, the game failed versus expectations set by EA themselves, but will survive as EA adjusts for the current realities.

Originally posted by hikaru77

Originally posted by mikahr

Originally posted by smh_alot
? It's funny how you distort my words. I don't believe that they never went above the 1m subs which imo is your own wishful thinking ('I want to see the game burn and fail! Fail!!1! HAHAHAHAHAAA' - ehm, sorry, cough >.>), and I stated that I find a 1.4-1.7m sub figure after the first month, based on sales and regular player retention drop, not that strange or illusionary at all, on the contrary.

 

But hey, whatever indeed >.>

Why are you trolling?

1. you dont believe their own words about it

2. i said its questionable if they ever broke 1m subs.

And yes, game is failure, and its not you that decides what is and what is not a failure, EA could not have been more clear on that matter.

So yeah, whatever.

No, SWTOR is the most successful p2p MMO post WoW, that is a fact, and not a wish or point of view. LEARN TO LIVE WITH IT.  

SWTOR was most successfull in promising me things it could not deliver.

A most successfull marketing made me buy it and the most polished preview videos made me thing the game looks good, even after i played for months.

While it may have been "successfull" moneywise, it was also the biggest flop game after wow.

It successfull ripped the people off.

Never played a game with that extremes in both directions, very good and devasting bad.

Originally posted by SumterSide

Originally posted by Atlan99

 

Like I said, their revenue is up because it's hard to lose even more money than they have. A few quarters ago, they reported a loss of 1 billion dollars. OF COURSE they're going to see a gain eventually.

They cut costs by firing staff that failed to meet their unrealistic expectations and gauging customers as much as humanly possible. And let's not forget the 600 MILLION dollar buy-back they used to save their stock from tumbling even further.

EA is litteraly trying to buy their way into success with their overinflated marketing budget. You don't see ads for Steam do you? Yet i see ads EVERYWHERE for EAs Origin. And despite that titanic marketing budget, EA still manages to come up short next to the competition.

It takes a special kind of corporation to spend so much on marketing that they can't possibly make up for it with box sales.

Well maybe not special. Maybe ignorant and bumbling would be better terms.

So EA is actually doing quite well financially.

You just hate them.

You could have just said that.

Yeah yeah, EA is doing well. Apparently they are doing so well people are willing to sell their stock at a LOSS just to get off.

Also apparently companies in the US do not have to pay taxes, pay their employees, rent buildings or pay for heating. Truly a marvelous country.

Kidding aside its quite obvious noone of you have ever run your own buisness if you really think:

Profit = Product.Sellprice * Product.Sold.Amount - Product.Creation.Cost

I mean that shit doesn't even work with products without after sales costs(which pretty much only leaves fricking vegetables).

You have no idea how expensive it is for a company like EA just to EXIST. Also you pretend the invest number thrown around months ago(regardless of wether it was accurate or not) is the total cost as of today. Do you think those people working on the game and the electricity used by their servers etc stopped being paid for? Their offices are in tents in a public park now, cantina serving pigeons?

IF EA is doing well, it's not because of TOR, that's for sure.

Originally posted by Rocketeer

Yeah yeah, EA is doing well. Apparently they are doing so well people are willing to sell their stock at a LOSS just to get off.

Also apparently companies in the US do not have to pay taxes, pay their employees, rent buildings or pay for heating. Truly a marvelous country.

 

Kidding aside its quite obvious noone of you have ever run your own buisness if you really think:

Profit = Product.Sellprice * Product.Sold.Amount - Product.Creation.Cost

I mean that shit doesn't even work with products without after sales costs(which pretty much only leaves fricking vegetables).

 

You have no idea how expensive it is for a company like EA just to EXIST. Also you pretend the invest number thrown around months ago(regardless of wether it was accurate or not) is the total cost as of today. Do you think those people working on the game and the electricity used by their servers etc stopped being paid for? Their offices are in tents in a public park now, cantina serving pigeons?

 

 

Just 1 failing game will cause a company's stock to go WAY down sometimes. Fake or sensationalized information can make company's stocks go WAY down. Just because a company's stock is going way down doesnt mean they are in serious trouble. EA owns the rights to the Sim games and has their own (virtually monopolizing) line of sports games. All of those games have virtually zero cost compared to a game like SWTOR. So $60 a pop for them, when they sell millions of all of them equals them not worrying if games fail, because they'll just rinse and repeat the strategy they have for those games (updated graphics, a couple new features, better UI, and real life similarities) in all their games until they start actually losing a substantial amount of money. (If you think they arent using this strategy for other games, look at Mass Effect 3.)

and it would actually be Profit = Product Sale Price* (((Physical Amount Product Sold - Physical Product Cost) + Digital Amount Sold)) - (Development and Upkeep Cost  + Advertising and Marketing Cost))

And that is even simplified.

Originally posted by Wayshuba

NCSoft recently reported they have already sold 3.12M boxes of GW2 - and that is just pre-purchase with no release date set beyond sometime in 2012. Based on their reports, they expect to sell somewhere around 5M-6M units by launch.

 

I am a big fan of GW2, so when people spread misinformation it bothers me...

The ncsoft financial report did not say that they have SOLD 3.12M copies. It says that they expect to sell 3.12M copies at release. It does not mention how many have been prepurchased before release.

If anyone actually has those figures, I would love to see them.

Originally posted by JoeyMMO

IF EA is doing well, it's not because of TOR, that's for sure.

 EA is not doing well, and its because of TOR. The stock was valued over $23 two weeks before TORs release...its worth 12.66 TODAY.

No amount of fanboy spin they try can change that FACT. EA is worth almost HALF its value since TORs release.

Originally posted by rdrakken

Originally posted by JoeyMMO

IF EA is doing well, it's not because of TOR, that's for sure.

 EA is not doing well, and its because of TOR. The stock was valued over $23 two weeks before TORs release...its worth 12.66 TODAY.

No amount of fanboy spin they try can change that FACT. EA is worth almost HALF its value since TORs release.

And Crysis 3 sales will knock them back up to 23...and you know who makes that profit, because they bought the stock low? EA. Thusly, they profit from their next big boost two-fold.

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Originally posted by rawfox

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Originally posted by hikaru77

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Originally posted by mikahr

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Originally posted by smh_alot ? It's funny how you distort my words. I don't believe that they never went above the 1m subs which imo is your own wishful thinking ('I want to see the game burn and fail! Fail!!1! HAHAHAHAHAAA' - ehm, sorry, cough >.>), and I stated that I find a 1.4-1.7m sub figure after the first month, based on sales and regular player retention drop, not that strange or illusionary at all, on the contrary.   But hey, whatever indeed >.>

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Why are you trolling? 1. you dont believe their own words about it 2. i said its questionable if they ever broke 1m subs. And yes, game is failure, and its not you that decides what is and what is not a failure, EA could not have been more clear on that matter. So yeah, whatever.

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No, SWTOR is the most successful p2p MMO post WoW, that is a fact, and not a wish or point of view. LEARN TO LIVE WITH IT.  

---

SWTOR was most successfull in promising me things it could not deliver.

A most successfull marketing made me buy it and the most polished preview videos made me thing the game looks good, even after i played for months.

While it may have been "successfull" moneywise, it was also the biggest flop game after wow.

It successfull ripped the people off.

Never played a game with that extremes in both directions, very good and devasting bad.

---

WoW is a flop? If WoW is a flop, then every other MMO game in existence is an even worse of a flop.

Personal tastes differing != Game is a flop.

Wish people would get out of the mind set that "I don't like a game, therefore said game is a flop."

LOTS of things are happening with EA and involving companies around them, DICE recently shut down EAUK and ea.com forums in favor of Battlelog forums (which is horrible horrible horrible), it's not run by DICE, it's run by EA which has some of the most god awful forum moderators in the universe- I only posted there ONCE replying to a guy thinking the AK74 sucks and told him to learn to burst fire it and got a warning from a mod, I've seen players get banned for saying the most minor things.

Originally posted by AzurePrower

 

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Originally posted by rawfox

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Originally posted by hikaru77

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Originally posted by mikahr

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Originally posted by smh_alot ? It's funny how you distort my words. I don't believe that they never went above the 1m subs which imo is your own wishful thinking ('I want to see the game burn and fail! Fail!!1! HAHAHAHAHAAA' - ehm, sorry, cough >.>), and I stated that I find a 1.4-1.7m sub figure after the first month, based on sales and regular player retention drop, not that strange or illusionary at all, on the contrary.   But hey, whatever indeed >.>

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Why are you trolling? 1. you dont believe their own words about it 2. i said its questionable if they ever broke 1m subs. And yes, game is failure, and its not you that decides what is and what is not a failure, EA could not have been more clear on that matter. So yeah, whatever.

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No, SWTOR is the most successful p2p MMO post WoW, that is a fact, and not a wish or point of view. LEARN TO LIVE WITH IT.  

---

SWTOR was most successfull in promising me things it could not deliver.

 

A most successfull marketing made me buy it and the most polished preview videos made me thing the game looks good, even after i played for months.

While it may have been "successfull" moneywise, it was also the biggest flop game after wow.

It successfull ripped the people off.

Never played a game with that extremes in both directions, very good and devasting bad.

---

 

WoW is a flop? If WoW is a flop, then every other MMO game in existence is an even worse of a flop.

Personal tastes differing != Game is a flop.

Wish people would get out of the mind set that "I don't like a game, therefore said game is a flop."

SWTOR is a flop. And it's flopping like a fish out of water. When SWTOR can hold it's subs longer than 4 months then we can talk. Until then, EA has a lot of work to do on SWTOR.

WoW on the other hand is dream every developer wants. To achieve that success your going to need better devs than Gabe and Greg at the helm.

Originally posted by Rocketeer

Originally posted by Larsa

Originally posted by JoeyMMO

...

 Profit would mean they broke even already. ...

Break even does not matter in accounting.

Break even is something you calculate or estimate before you begin with a project, after the project the term has no value, the money you spent to develop the game is gone (search the net for "sunk costs").

A project can be profitable to continue without ever reaching break even. You've sunk the cost to produce something, in this case SWTOR. As long as the revenue you generate in a financial year is higher than the costs in that year it's profitable - no matter whether break even has been reached or not.

That doesn't carry well into games(especially MMOs) and devhouses producing them, mainly because of opportunity costs and limited skilled labor force.

In the end they very well have to decide between keeping artists, programmers and gamedesigners etc on SWTOR, or transfer them to another project from which they expect a higher rate of profit(laying off skilled people is a last resort, you only do that if you overextended yourself and have to cut down on costs, otherwise you would assign them to another project or create a new project). There are simply not that many people out there that can successfully deploy a AAA MMO that you can simply treat them like an expendable commodity which you just buy new ones off for your next project.

The concept of sunk costs is true but in declaring that SWTOR costs are sunk you run into the bigger picture. The issue of how EA is funded because you are assuming that they are covered 'somewhere' in the bowels of EA.

If SWTOR had been EA's only product they would now be, at the very least, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy - and you need look no further than 38 Studios and Kingdoms of Amalur.

EA have bonds which give EA cash on which they pay interest. Some of these could be attributed to SWTOR - for development. They probably aren't. Indeed if cost of the sunk cost sits with SWTOR then the costs are not really sunk. Bottomline however: if every game  EA made never recovered its development costs then at some point the money, or more precisely the money lenders, will dry up and EA will tank. So yes SWTOR costs are sunk ... but it matters. Hello Mr. Lender we are a developer of Class A flops please lend us lots of money ....

And are EA covering their running costs? Well they have some subscribers locked in for 6 months - plus the included 30 days + a free 30 days but .... the chicken bones suggest that it may not be.

Edit: 6/22

With the server merges Tor status has Tor now up to 12 NA servers left and 5 Euro servers.  Or 17 total non dead servers.  While the number of servers is not impressive the gain and health of those servers is unexpectedly high.  Thye have now received population gains for 8 straight days.  The merged servers are mostly very healthy in terms of pop and not near in danger of going back to dead status.  The strength of the rebound looks much better this week than last week and certainly seem to have added some momentum.  In terms of total population its anyones guess what it is for 17 servers.  Likely 150k-300k.  The merged servers are not empty but they are not near being full either so its unlikely that each server would have close to the 20k (not concurrent) one would expect with a full server or the 5k one would expect with one almost dead.  Somewhere likely on the middle.

But if one is a Tor fan the last week should be very encouraging.  There is some momentum and the first sustained growth the game has ever had.  With 8 consecutive days of gains building a little bigger each day.

Originally posted by SpottyGekko

So as long as SWTOR is open for business, it means EA are making "enough" profit, regardless of what third-party sites may say about the population 

 Might also be part of their contract with Lucas Arts. Even if the game is not profitable they are forced to keep it going at their expense.

To the people calling SWTOR a financial failure/flop:  where are you getting your numbers from?

The game isn't as successful as 1 or 2 other MMOs, yes, and it doesn't do what many players on forums like these seem to "need".  But those factors do not a "flop" make, right?

Originally posted by Fennris

To the people calling SWTOR a financial failure/flop:  where are you getting your numbers from?

The game isn't as successful as 1 or 2 other MMOs, yes, and it doesn't do what many players on forums like these seem to "need".  But those factors do not a "flop" make, right?

It's been generally viewed as a poor investment. Is that enough fail for you?

When you take the most expensive MMO 'ever' to make, and roughly break even, that is not a success. On any lvl.

TOR...TOR...TOR.... oh! it's that little game I played at the start of the year.

Took about a month to complete (might be why it's turning a little stale now) :P