Originally posted by Tortanic007

After seeing taela's post on Pachter's estimate of 50 million accounts for swtor (this is after going free to play), it might make sense. You have free to play games like runescape who tells the world they have 200 million accounts registered worldwide.

worth noting runescape was around for 11 years before they announced that

     That is the beauty about using a F2P format.. It gives the company a huge tool to muck up the numbers of how many actually play the game.. Eventually even the CEO's will not know if a game is sucessful or not, or growing or not.. They will only be able to quickly use "profit" number at the bottom of the sheet..  A dev could go to management saying, "oh we need F2P because we can really work on that cash shop, yada yada yada", when their true intent is just to save their jobs because of bleeding sub numbers..  One may never know..

     I have to say.. I'm really liking the B2P options.. The presure of playing to justify the $15 a month isn't there.. IMO it puts the pressure on the devs to CREATE a reason for me to support you..  If you don't create good content to buy, you get nothing.. Works for me :)

There is some question regarding the way the article is worded when trying to get at the meat of what Pachter actually said. To be gentle toward him, if SWTOR is stuck in the purely western market NO, they will not get 10 million active subscription paying players and 50 million accounts in two years.That has not happened with any MMORPG I know of in just two years while operating in a niche. Frankly, I wonder how long it would take and how much it would cost to localize SWTOR for various other markets around the world in part due to the sheer amount of voice over work that would be needed. It may not be practical to do.

You have games like Runescape with 200 million accounts or Maplestory with 92 million players  (per Daniel Kim later in the article) but I am not sure how either’s profitability really compares to WOW. Funny to say SWTOR isn’t in their league yet... Kinda disturbing too. 

Originally posted by BlackestNite

Originally posted by Nadia

Originally posted by Tortanic007

After seeing taela's post on Pachter's estimate of 50 million accounts for swtor (this is after going free to play), it might make sense. You have free to play games like runescape who tells the world they have 200 million accounts registered worldwide.

worth noting runescape was around for 11 years before they announced that

and had good word of mouth.

and is fun to play.

Originally posted by colddog04
It'll be one of those things that happens over time. 3 years from now they'll say, "50 million accounts! YAY!" and everyone will look over at the F2P game and shrug their shoulders because they know that the number is pretty standard for F2P games.

The same could be said about GW and GW2. Even though it is B2P, the number of boxes has no real reflection of the amount of people that are actually playing it. The number of accounts registered or boxes sold is meaningless.

Honestly Michael Pachter has made some decent predictions in the past, but this one is way out there. He does get paid to do this kind of thing, but I just find 50 million unbelievable. I would be amazed if they even had over 10 million accounts total created after F2P. I can see them getting up to maybe 5 million in a year or so after F2P but thats about it. It does not mean that the game will be any bit more successful though because they have to keep up with the promise of content patches every 6 weeks which everyone knows won't happen.

I think most people will just play through one or two of the stories and call it a day. The end game is certainly not worth paying for and everyone with half a brain realizes this.

Originally posted by stevebmbsqd

Originally posted by colddog04
It'll be one of those things that happens over time. 3 years from now they'll say, "50 million accounts! YAY!" and everyone will look over at the F2P game and shrug their shoulders because they know that the number is pretty standard for F2P games.

The same could be said about GW and GW2. Even though it is B2P, the number of boxes has no real reflection of the amount of people that are actually playing it. The number of accounts registered or boxes sold is meaningless.

Except GW1 actually had to sell boxes. When SWTOR goes F2P, they will not have to sell boxes. This makes the situations completely different as a registration to GW1 requires that a person pays money and a registration to SWTOR requires you to have a valid e-mail address.