I don't like saying it. I like playing SWTOR. What is left of our guild trys to scrape up enough to do Ops now. My friends have left the game. Many podcasts and supporters of the game have left and moved on. There are not even any devs now for SWTOR, just a marketing board and a handful left for customer service now. Rehashing old gear and selling it for real money that should have been in the game already. Selling upcoming patches, not real expansions, for money. Months before fixing problems. The list goes on and on.

I was so afraid when I seen EA got ahold of SWTOR. I had a sick pit in my stomach knowing they will kill a great game. I really didn't expect it to happen so fast. Fast like March of 2012, the firing and closing shop of the game because the EA greed wasn't fullfilled. Because they didn't "beat" the fake, inflated numbers of WoW. I know, there will be people out there, fanboys of EA and of SWTOR that will flame and argue that I am stupid, dumb, wrong, etc. But this is a post coming from a person that didn't want to believe it either. That stopped drinking the kool-aid and took off the rose-colored glasses and really seen what is happening.

So, the TL;DR version is; how long until EA "offically" kills SWTOR? Sort of taking bets, predicting the future, thing.

They kind of have to milk it for as long as the license is valid.  They spent a rumored 200 to 250 million developing the game, not including marketing costs which are probably another 50 million at least.  Anyway, even if we lowball the whole figure and say it cost them 200 million total to launch, the numbers are still pretty grim.

They made something like just over 80 million in box and digital sales (roughly 2 million units sold in the first few months, and all but stopped after that).  Subscriber numbers also dropped significantly after a few months, to the vague "over 500k but under 1m" number.  Assuming it's around 750k, that means they made about 11 million per month in subs.  That may sound like a high number, but it would take a good solid year to even approach making back the money they initially spent on releasing the game.

The problem is that we haven't even factored in the costs associated with maintaning the game (hardware and developers), or the licensing costs associated with one of the most expensive IP's ever.  You can bet Lucas is getting a flat percentage off the top of all sales, before anything else is accounted for.  It's going to be many many years before EA sees any kind of return on their investment.

If you look back, a lot of their decisions make sense from a business perspective.  The game wasn't designed as well as they thought, resulting in much less growth than expected.  They could either invest even more money into trying to fix the problems and dig themselves into a deeper hole, or they could cut costs in the one place they controlled, which is labor.  So the studio got downsided and largely replaced with cheaper labor and EA decided to not take any more risks on the game.  Priority shifted to the F2P conversion so that they could hopefully justify keeping the game live long enough to finally recoup the losses they incured by releasing it in the first place.

So in short, it won't be shutting down any time soon, because they can't afford to shut it down.

When they don't gain enough money from it anymore to keep people around for it, they'll close shop. This is EA we're talking about here. When that'll be exactly depends on the people playing and paying for the game, not on EA. When the ones playing turn out to be freeloaders, then exit SWTOR.

Play the stories while you still can, if it's worth the download to you anyways.

Originally posted by ShakyMo
I do think its in maintainance mode like war though. Expect most future content to be cash grab in nature.

I don't think that's really fair to say just yet. They're putting out more content and patching more now than they have in a long time. We're getting an add-on or expansion or whatever you want to call it in a few months. We got a new WZ, a new questing area, new space missions, and a hardmode version of a raid in the last two months or so. Maybe none of that is content for you, but it is content nontheless. Despite my general disdain for how Bioware/EA handled this game early on, I'm pretty happy with what they're doing now.

If Makeb is a success for them, I suspect we'll be seeing more content like that in the future, which is something I'd enjoy. If Makeb and the cash shop in general fails to live up to their expectations, then we'll probably see maintainance mode, but for now I don't see the game in that state at all.

Originally posted by sirphobos
Even if SWTOR is only around 200k-300k subscribers, it's still a huge cash cow and isn't going anywhere anytime soon.  Slower release of new content is likely, however.

lol, this is what people don't understand.  It's not a cash cow.  At 300k subs, they'd be making about 4.5 million a month (IP royalties would actually eat out of that ammount), which would barely dent the cost of developing and releasing the game (200 to 250 million + marketing is the estimate), much less maintaining it month to month.

Originally posted by ShakyMo
Ages considering uo, daoc & war are still going.

None of those were expensive to make and license, which is the problem with SWtOR.

Age of Empires Online is Microsoft Studios and Gas powered Games, and has nothing to do whatsoever with EA. 

AoEO will still run, just no new content will be devloped for it, since no one wanted to pay money for things....makes sense to me.

Just because EA is the new devil does not mean it starts all the evil in the world.

Originally posted by ShakyMo
Yeah the "expansion" reminds me of the war "expansion"

It costs $10. Are people expecting to have a WoW-esque expansion that fundamentally changes the game for $10? We're getting a whole new planet the size of Hoth or Belsavis, voiced storylines, new abilities, and likely some more "stuff" that hasn't been talked about yet. What do you want for $10?

I think them naming it an expansion was a PR blunder because gamers have certain expectations when it comes to an expansion.

Originally posted by sirphobos
Even if SWTOR is only around 200k-300k subscribers, it's still a huge cash cow and isn't going anywhere anytime soon.  Slower release of new content is likely, however.

This. 

Originally posted by ShakyMo
Ages considering uo, daoc & war are still going.

UO and DAoC are still profitable and don't have competition for their dedicated communities. 

I have no explanation for War though, so thats a valid point. 

Why ask this question? its so easy to figure out. oh wait its just a hatorade troll of swtor.

Did EA unplug WAR yet? don't think so. tell me when that happens.

i am interested how you can compare a game, not even of the same publisher/genre/quality to another and ask if they are going to close the server?

Its like asking since original Halo servers were closed on xbox, are they going to close down the Battlefield servers on pc.