Originally posted by Praetalus

This game will be profitable if not already. And I'm saying this as someone who just cancelled recently to play Tera. You guys with your numbers just don't seem to get it. 1.3 millions subs is A LOT. People get blinded by the WoW numbers and think that if a game doesn't have 5 million subs that it's a failure. No game but WoW has over 5 million subs or even close for that matter.

 

TOR will probably settle around 700-800K subs within this year and guess what? That would still be really impressive. That is plenty of players. Of course they will need to do something about the 400 servers they have, but they have even said, they need about 500K to be profitable. 

 

I mean hell, I played eq2 for about three years and they were sporting on average around 200K subs. And it was profitable. Enough so that the damn game is still around. In fact, it's probably went up to around 450K since it went free and has new life to it. 

 

All in all, in the current market, I would call it a sucess in my opinion. 

NOOoo that free time was counted in that 1.3 million subs. Before you say prove it, I say prove it's not.

Originally posted by SuperDonk

Originally posted by lizardbones

 

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Originally posted by Istavaan

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Originally posted by busdriver "$60 (I’m rolling in CE, DCE and regular boxes all in here) - that means $102 million in BioWare’s pockets at the get-go."   Fanboi or just stupid? Hard to say.

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40% of that goes to LA right off the bat.

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No, it actually doesn't. Not until EA/Bioware has recouped their development costs.

 

 Wouldn't it just be fantastic if LA ended up getting nothing for SWTOR?

On behalf of all SWG fanboys, I'll just say priceless.

Found this pic of EA giving a press conference on TOR after the layoffs and decline in subs:

Originally posted by WhiteLantern

Interestingly enough, on a recent boring road-trip I started doing calculations in my head about TOR's income. My conclusions were pretty much the same with only a minor change: I'm pretty sure they said they had sold over 2 million copies at the same time they announced the 1.7m sub number (which, btw, was before the Oceanic launch).

 

I do think they are close to, if not already, making small profit on this one. Not the kind of monies a publisher like EA wants, and probably so small that it facilitated the recent layoffs.

 

So, I may be the only one here that agrees with his numbers, but I do think he's close.

He's not close at all.

EA themselves never said - as the OP said - that they had '1.7 m subs'. What EA said was that they had '1.7 active accounts'. It has already been established - and confirmed by EA - that this figure includes trial accounts and accounts undergoing their free month. This applies to the later figure of 1.3 m too.

EA have been very sly about the sub figures it has released - primarily to shore up its sinking share price, I assume.

Originally posted by Praetalus

Originally posted by JoeyMMO

I guess it's convenient to forget that the game cost well over $200M to develop. Nearer to 200M than to 300M, but considerably more than 200M, at least if the guys running TOR know what they're talking about. Let's take a rough estimate of 230M. I doubt they're out of the woods just yet. It brings in more money than it costs to keep it going. And then you still factor in $0 of the huge BW acquisition cost into TOR.

And we also assume LA doesn't get a cent until EA breaks even. Even the current reduced dev team + the grossly overpaid leads + the marketing campaign still costs them money, quite a lot of money too. They have to bring in considerably more than $230M, easily around $350M, before they really break even.

They'll have a turn a profit first, before it could be called a success. I don't see that happening just yet, if ever.

Can you post where you read those numbers from Bioware? You seem very sure about them, so surely you have some sort of information that the rest of us do not have.  You seem to know the salaries of the employees now also...lol. You make a lot of assumptions with absolutely no evidence to back this shit up. Nice internets win. 

Thanks, 

I'm sure about the numbers, my memory is just fine with numbers. The name of the guy giving the interview however. Was it Ohlen, Dickinson, Riccitiello or the CFO that quit a week after he claimed SWTOR was a success? Dunno, don't care, not even relevant.

The budget was $150M, before they ran into some unexpected problems, taking it over $200 but nowhere near the $300M speculation that was going around at the time. That's the gist of what he said on SWTOR cost.

If you want to find them and they're still there you'll find them. If your job is to take those numbers offline, I'm not going to help you do your job for you. So do what you must about this 'shit'.

Financially EA have said:

Cover running costs at 500k subscibers.

Make a profit, but  nothing to write home about, with 1M subs for some - unspecified - time. Debate in articles suggested 1 to 2 years depending on advertising, sales, level of subs etc. etc.

So currently:

Running costs being covered - at least until the start of the 30-day free period. Now?

Made a profit? Based on what EA have said: no.

And if the writer of the post (not the OP) ever goes into business can I hire him to sell goods for me based on his logic. I get 100% and he apys all the taxes, sales costs, he pays the people to make the goods and the cost of the material. I predict the OP will be in great demand and will put Amazon and Wal-mart out of business - or go bankrupt of course. 

Bioware

EA

LA 

All take a share

Retailers take the biggest profit off of boxed copies where as digital copies are obviously full profit as it's via Origin.

However constant development of hundreds of people isn't cheap and you have bills to pay and that could be 5 million a month.......

SWTOR isn't profitable in the slightest yet.

I don't understand the part about wii sports.

Is he talking about the game that barely anyone purchased because it came pachaged with the wii?  I'm just confused, because nintendo didn't actually sell a hell of a lot of copies of that game, because it was, you know, a part of a pachage and the game was free.

And bioware didn't make a penny off of ToR, not even today.  EA makes money of the game and they give BW an amount of money to work with.  And not even EA made, even on an average, of $60 per box sold.  That would mean that at least half of all copies sold were CE's and that it cost them next to nothing to produce.

Somethng a lot of people don't realize.  Games aren't a pay on scan item for just about all retailers.  Pay on scan items are items that a retailer only pay for if the item is actually sold.  Retailers, almost always, have to purchase the game from the distributor.  If they don't sell it they don't get reimbursed, that's why you see games go into bargain bins, the distributor won't take it back.  The cost in the store reflects the retailers markup. 

There is no way in th world that EA makes $60 off a box sale, no game company does.

Originally posted by Zhauric

At least according to this article so thought some folks may enjoy the read. I don't agree with the acticle or his numbers honestly but thought it an interesting attempt...err....read.

 

http://torwars.com/2012/05/23/open-t...lled-republic/


 blah, blah, blah, wall of text that's wrong from start to finish...
  

On the odd chance you are the same individual who wrote the blog post, I did leave a response to the horrible analysis on the blog from whence it came.  If you are not, rebutting your entirely wrong  analysis would take me more column inches to fix it than it's worth and you can just see what I wrote about the laughable financial analysis that was done...   I'm just too tired to fight that mass of complete wrong twice in one day.

Originally posted by tixylix

Bioware

EA

LA 

All take a share

Retailers take the biggest profit off of boxed copies where as digital copies are obviously full profit as it's via Origin.

 

However constant development of hundreds of people isn't cheap and you have bills to pay and that could be 5 million a month.......

 

SWTOR isn't profitable in the slightest yet.

Yeah.  It was one of the worst fanboy analysis of the game I've ever seen.   I left a more detailed post on the blog it came from.    It was so bad that its 'not even wrong' and a very long article could be written about everything wrong with the post, from the first premise to the last wrong conclusion.

The phrase was coined by theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who was known for his colorful objections to incorrect or sloppy thinking. Rudolf Peierls writes that "a friend showed Pauli the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli's views. Pauli remarked sadly, 'It is not even wrong.' "

It really left me depressed.   How could you be so wrong.  That you didn't even think of a single cost.   That you weren't even aware of the difference between retail and wholesale.  I mean, how the heck does Target or Walmart or Safeway or any other retail store make it's money?   Does this guy even know that they pay less for the products than they sell them for?

Ugh.

Originally posted by JoeyMMO

Originally posted by Praetalus

Originally posted by JoeyMMO

I guess it's convenient to forget that the game cost well over $200M to develop. Nearer to 200M than to 300M, but considerably more than 200M, at least if the guys running TOR know what they're talking about. Let's take a rough estimate of 230M. I doubt they're out of the woods just yet. It brings in more money than it costs to keep it going. And then you still factor in $0 of the huge BW acquisition cost into TOR.

And we also assume LA doesn't get a cent until EA breaks even. Even the current reduced dev team + the grossly overpaid leads + the marketing campaign still costs them money, quite a lot of money too. They have to bring in considerably more than $230M, easily around $350M, before they really break even.

They'll have a turn a profit first, before it could be called a success. I don't see that happening just yet, if ever.

Can you post where you read those numbers from Bioware? You seem very sure about them, so surely you have some sort of information that the rest of us do not have.  You seem to know the salaries of the employees now also...lol. You make a lot of assumptions with absolutely no evidence to back this shit up. Nice internets win. 

Thanks, 

I'm sure about the numbers, my memory is just fine with numbers. The name of the guy giving the interview however. Was it Ohlen, Dickinson, Riccitiello or the CFO that quit a week after he claimed SWTOR was a success? Dunno, don't care, not even relevant.

The budget was $150M, before they ran into some unexpected problems, taking it over $200 but nowhere near the $300M speculation that was going around at the time. That's the gist of what he said on SWTOR cost.

If you want to find them and they're still there you'll find them. If your job is to take those numbers offline, I'm not going to help you do your job for you. So do what you must about this 'shit'.

 

I remember reading the same thing.   Also, I remember that BioWare had gotten a lot of the money as a royalty advance from LA, plus they put in a lot of their own money.    But EA had to drop in another $80 million to finish it. 

So, EA directly, is only into the MMO for $80 million.  And it's NOT the lion's share of the costs which were born by LA in production advances.  

The author of that piece is either ignorant or just a pure fanboy (hate to use that word)

Look, they spent what, 160mill? and several years on this investment, their ROI is horrible to say the least, EA could have spent the money on several other places, and made alot more money than they did, that calls for a complete failure, obviously this game won't be pulling in money for them for several years.

I'm sure they would have prefered a mmo that would have been able to pull some 2 mill subs, they didnt get that, thats a terrible investment.

I'm surprised to see that some people are defending the game as much as they are, it's a mmo, had they sold it as a Diablo like game (single player with online coop), it would probably had done better, and not dissapointed as many people as it did.

Look, if you buy a mobile home and get a van, you'd be pretty upset too, especially when you've been told for years, that it's a new mobile home and it's going to rock! and that's all there is to it, SWTOR is a terrible mmorpg.

People also need to be aware of the difference on mmoRPG's and single player RPG's, the mmorpg's I've played, the RPG part were contributed by the players, not by cutscenes, cutscenes are fun for singleplayer games, and should stay there.

I'm not surprised that the single player crowd love the game, it is a decent single player game, heck I probably would have enjoyed more aswell, had they not announced it as a mmo, and left out mmo parts, which are just terrible in the game.

An MMO success to me is : 1 (One, Uno) server at max capacity.. Yes even if that server capacity is 20 people, if you have all 20 spots on that one server full at least 1/4th of every day then you are successful..

Lets be honest, not everybody in a band is a rockstar.. When they perform in front of a fan base of even 30 people, it can be considered a success..

It is a failure on a bigger scale than the endless pockets of EA can salvage because of the damage it has done to their reputation (not that EA has a good one to start with).

How many people will buy another MMO by them now? I can bet that it has put a dent in any future Mass Effect MMO project too as many people live by the 'once bitten, twice shy' motto like myself.

Originally posted by Vyeth

An MMO success to me is : 1 (One, Uno) server at max capacity.. Yes even if that server capacity is 20 people, if you have all 20 spots on that one server full at least 1/4th of every day then you are successful..

Lets be honest, not everybody in a band is a rockstar.. When they perform in front of a fan base of even 30 people, it can be considered a success..

 

 

 

Go invest $200 million on some MMO and then say that again.

So, you do not know what they spent to make the game and....

You do not know how much they made, leaving out several factors that influence the "profit".

Leaving your summary on the success of a game and/or its profitability a total SWAG and not based on anything concrete or even remotely concrete.  Are you perhaps a Statistician?

Originally posted by Istavaan

Originally posted by busdriver

"$60 (I’m rolling in CE, DCE and regular boxes all in here) - that means $102 million in BioWare’s pockets at the get-go."

 

Fanboi or just stupid? Hard to say.

40% of that goes to LA right off the bat.

Incorrect. Only after EA has achieved break even point and recouped its investment costs.

Originally posted by JoeyMMO

Originally posted by Praetalus

Originally posted by JoeyMMO

I guess it's convenient to forget that the game cost well over $200M to develop. Nearer to 200M than to 300M, but considerably more than 200M, at least if the guys running TOR know what they're talking about. Let's take a rough estimate of 230M. I doubt they're out of the woods just yet. It brings in more money than it costs to keep it going. And then you still factor in $0 of the huge BW acquisition cost into TOR.

And we also assume LA doesn't get a cent until EA breaks even. Even the current reduced dev team + the grossly overpaid leads + the marketing campaign still costs them money, quite a lot of money too. They have to bring in considerably more than $230M, easily around $350M, before they really break even.

They'll have a turn a profit first, before it could be called a success. I don't see that happening just yet, if ever.

Can you post where you read those numbers from Bioware? You seem very sure about them, so surely you have some sort of information that the rest of us do not have.  You seem to know the salaries of the employees now also...lol. You make a lot of assumptions with absolutely no evidence to back this shit up. Nice internets win. 

Thanks, 

I'm sure about the numbers, my memory is just fine with numbers. The name of the guy giving the interview however. Was it Ohlen, Dickinson, Riccitiello or the CFO that quit a week after he claimed SWTOR was a success? Dunno, don't care, not even relevant.

The budget was $150M, before they ran into some unexpected problems, taking it over $200 but nowhere near the $300M speculation that was going around at the time. That's the gist of what he said on SWTOR cost.

If you want to find them and they're still there you'll find them. If your job is to take those numbers offline, I'm not going to help you do your job for you. So do what you must about this 'shit'.

 

? Never heard of those figures in official format, merely guesses and blogs. Unless the numbers come from reliable and preferrably official sources, this all sounds like hearsays to me, no offense.

Originally posted by soulmirror

So, you do not know what they spent to make the game and....

You do not know how much they made, leaving out several factors that influence the "profit".

Leaving your summary on the success of a game and/or its profitability a total SWAG and not based on anything concrete or even remotely concrete.  Are you perhaps a Statistician?

 

 

I haven't seen any formal statement about costs - lots of discussion about 800+ people employed etc. but we don't know for how long.

As i posted above however financially EA have said:

Cover running costs at 500k subscibers.

Make a profit, but nothing to write home about, with 1M subs for some - unspecified - time. Debate in articles suggested 1 to 2 years depending on advertising, sales, level of subs etc. etc. EA were talking "long term" at the time.

As for what it cost however you can get an idea. If you are really keen there are actually 3 different costs: the absolute cost; what it cost EA and what it cost EA shareholders.

First we know how long it took to develop, we know that staff ramps up and we know that e.g. WAR had 430 people when it launched (we were told), 250 people by year 2 and so forth - there were the usual 'most expensive game' type statements. We know that Funcom had got the AoC team down to 250 after 6 months - they shifted people faster.

1. Ignore all the huge numbers being mentioned, how many people were involved etc. and make a stab at a staff profile. Tis is a guess so be conservative say 100 man years in year 1, 200 in year 2, 300 in year 3 and 400 in years 4 and 5. Man years so you may have some part time staff etc. Put your own numbers in.

2. Add up the man years: 100+200+300+400+400 = 1400.

3. Pick a cost per man year. Say $100k to keep the calcs simple. $100k covering wages, taxes, dental, medical, all taxes and all expences including software costs, servers, travel costs, marketing costs for a marketeer etc. You can check the average salary costs of a software developer type person working in Austin but I doubt anyone will claim that $100k is to big a number. Way to small probably.

4. 1400 x $100k = $140M

5. EA paid $620M cash for Bioware/Pamdemic  - it is in their SEC filings. They have published 13 games (could be 14 now) but $620/13 is $45-$50M. That is assuming that all the titles published had 'equal weight' - they didn't SWTOR was a bigger title than some but lets keep it conservative.

6. If you are/were an EA shareholder - and analyst reports are done for shareholders - then EA also "paid" c. $260M in stock options - hard to say what they are worth and not really a cost to EA so I am ignoring these. (However $260/13 would be another $20M).

7. Did EA pay LucasArts upfront? As an example of possible costs reports in  the last few days suggest that Activision will not be renewing their $30M licence for NBA - and that is basically only of value in the US. SW is a worldwide IP.

Conslusion: articles suggesting that SWTOR cost $80M - very suspect; articles suggesting that SWTOR cost $200M look feasible; and at $300-$500m  - possible given the staff numbers thrown around but less likely. 

At the end of the day though we just have to look at what EA have said: 500k break even; 1M for the long term - make a profit but nothing to write home about.

Way, waaay too much speculation with fuzzy numbers. For example, why the 500 man in the 5th year? Are we talking about fulltimers? What is the source for this estimation? Should we assume that other MMO companies have a sortlike cost and amount of people working? If not, why not? Where's the proof that this doesn't apply to other MMO companies? But let's assume they have half the manpower, that those MMO's had merely 200-250 fulltimers, does this mean that those other MMO's had a minimal development cost of 70-80+ million dollars?

The only given is the statement about having a profit with 1 million subs. Reason seems to suggest 1 year trajectory (imo the likeliest), 2 year trajectory at most. In the end though, we simply don't know what length of time they were talking about.

I'm very sceptical towards any amount above 100-120 million dollars, for the bare simple fact that so far in all those years no MMO's passed the 60 million dollar total cost. Well, except for Tabula Rasa, but as Gariott and other sources admitted, they basically blew 2 full years through the drain by differences of vision and because they radically changed the game design and gameplay mid project.

Anyway, it's all speculation of course. But the figures used have a very, very high degree of fuzziness and ghost hunting, imo.

a success at launch, yes. a success at growth no. That's not opinion that's facts.

wow launched with a smaller sub base and grew. ToR  launched witha  high sub base and has shrunk , that's the difference.

You don't fire people if it's a "success" no matter how you twist the words. EA/Bioware has managed to make people think that losing subs is somehow growth, and that layoffs are somehow going to make the game better.

This game, is the best leveling experience i have ever played in an mmo, but it ends there. The people know it, the devs know  it, the investors know it and EA knows it. Let it die , or let it keep its swg population for 10 years. Either way, its not an mmo, and it's not a "growing success", im sorry.

ps. if you think 1mil people are playing this game , have your head checked. i would be suprised at 20k concurrent users on a rare night. i havent paid in months for this game yet my sub is still active.