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Star Wars MMO Estimated To Cost $100M
donniebaseball23 writes "EA's BioWare is developing its first-ever MMORPG in Star Wars: The Old Republic, and the publisher is betting big that the project will be a huge success. Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter says development alone cost an estimated $80 million, with marketing and distribution adding in another $20 million. The good news is it shouldn't take much to break even. 'We estimate that EA will cover its direct operating costs and break even at 500,000 subscribers (this is exceedingly conservative, and the actual figure is probably closer to 350,000), meaning that with 1.5 million paying subscribers, EA will have 1 million profitable subs,' Pachter noted."
They're now aiming for a release late this year, but acknowledged the possibility that it could slip to January 2012. If you're curious about the current state of the gameplay, Eurogamer and Rock, Paper, Shotgun (PvE, PvP) both posted write-ups of some recent hands-on time.
Great, even more people will be camping their parent's basements.
Thought so as well, somethings not right here.
This is code for "damn, November 2011 is looking pretty crowded with AAA title games - we might reevaluate the situation and climate - not to mention our customer's wallets - and release at a later date."
Not that I blame them. I can think of at least five AAA games coming out this fall, and I don't even follow gaming news all that closely. Christmas titles are getting as much pre-marketing as presidential candidates these years. After Valve has proven with three titles now (L4D, L4D2, Portal 2), a spring release can still be extremely profitable. Sounds like other studios might start caching in on the developing year-round release cycle.
moox. for a new generation.
What, you expected sensible and consistent accounting from a publicly traded company? rofl
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I think that was just a rumor perpetuated by a disgruntled blogger/EA Employee, calling themselves EA Louse./
Industry analysts find it hard to overstate EA's satisfaction.
Not only this, but also "how many months/years of subscription required by these people"?
This is an MMO, if it goes into a classic "many buyers who do not sign up for game time after their trial that came with purchase period is up", I suspect even a several million sales would fall short of paying for it.
MMOs live and die by subscriptions. Not by copy sales. We have a boatload of failed WoW-killers that had a lot of initial sales, but almost no people signing up for more time.
On a personal note, the more I read about this game, the more I think that it's doomed to fail by design. A plot-based game is good for one playthrough - after this, you're done with it. Meaning you'll buy a copy, play through the game and be done with it. You'd have to patch in new content (and by extension, new plot lines) at an incredible pace to keep people interested. I suspect that even blizzard with its incredibly polished development machine could not pull that kind of development speed off.
Oh please... some of us are well adjusted adults with jobs and all, and can afford our own basement to camp in ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Who is going to play that? Shit, I always balk a bit at $60 for a game, but, that's at least somewhat reasonable. I don't have 100 million burning a hole in my pocket though, good luck to anyone who picks up that title. Not going to be massively multiplayer with a cost like that!
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I'm not sure I'd that much every month just to play a game.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Since each class supposedly has its very own storyline, if they're all well done it might have considerably more replay value than one playthrough. I do agree that it doesn't seem to be built for very long-term sustainability, but if they can hold on to subscribers for even six months that might be enough time to construct a compelling end game.
$100 million is not really that huge compared with other recent mmos.
I never have understood why game publishers historically shoot for a Christmas release date. When I was growing up my parents, friends, nor extended family ever bought me a single video game. It's too complicated to shop for games for someone else, especially when it's a PC game; you have a lot of things to look for in what your target audience needs: platform (Windows, Mac, ... Linux?), CPU, memory, GPU, etc. On top of all of that you cannot return any software to any retailer and Steam only makes it slightly easier to send a game to someone.
Outside of the above, you have Christmas, New Years, and the winter break for college students - why release a game amidst that? Pick the summer when kids have more time free, more money to buy games from their summer job, and more freedom to reliably shop for software. There's still another 10 or so reasons I haven't even touched on as to why NOT to release a game during winter break, but apparently people speak with their money to the contrary.
You say that like there are people in the world not disgruntled by EA (ex-employees and non-employees [ie: gamers])
EA has single handedly destroyed my will to game. I've been seeking out game publishers that don't treat their customers like pond scum to be able to play decent games and every time I do, EA scoops them up and infects them with viral hate goo.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
penis is for pleasure
Since each class supposedly has its very own storyline...
Yeah, so instead of not reading the dialog box about how your carbine soldier needs to deliver 45 wombat hides you can not read the dialog that pops up from the same NPC asking you to collect 45 wombat furs.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Considering the rumors that are and were floating around and the many delays this project suffered already it's hard to believe that it will cost "only" 100 mio. incl. marketing. I heard numbers reaching as high as 250 mio. and it would surprise me if they would manage to stay below 100 mio. for development only.
World of Warcraft is a plot based game as well. And the plot only really moves forward with each major expansion, yet it never seems to have trouble attracting people.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
EA do what they must because they can.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
But I just read $80M on another website: http://www.the-magicbox.com/gaming.htm Wait a minute, it's still in development right? So the number changes every day...
Hey /.
So lets quickly look at some MMOS
Eve-online: Great MMO supported by a company that loves it (to a degree) and really tries to make the game better. Driving 80% by player actions and the developers give the tools to the players to create their own content, this is a sandbox game
WoW: They got it right here, the first real user friendly pretty MMO, with a simple mission system and great back story supported by an existing legion of fans who already played blizzard games. Remember that it took 2 years to iron out the bugs and in that time it had no competition. Not driven by player actions in anyway. We call this a funfair game, all the rides must be built before hand for you to enjoy
SWG: Was also one of my favs because i felt like it had a mix of both sandbox and funfair, the crafting in the game was completely player driven, while the developers still added content to keep people entertained if they were too lazy to amuse themselves.
I tend to believe these 3 older MMOS are the basis of what we really have today.
Moving on, TOR i am not sure about, they are spending huge amounts of money on Voice overs, getting actors in, what i believe they are trying to create is an amazing storyline in an MMO. The problem with this is that MMOs need reply-ability and one great story line only cuts it so much. I will be playing Tor when it comes out but I fear that they are focusing too much on developing a storyline when really they should be building the tools to create communities, since its the players and the guilds/corps/groups of people that make a game good or not. I not got to play Tor Yet, but I just feel this is going to be one of those things that looks amazing, 10/10 but just has not depth to it. Also because of the amount of money they have spent and the fact it will be multi server means once again players really do not change the world and everyone just ends up running the same missions. Meh, Someone make more sandbox games, and yes i know there ar a few out there, i think i consider darkfal as more sandboxie, and ofcouse mincraft not sure we can count that as an MMO tho
www.leagueoflegends.com www.firefallthegame.com (release expected later this year). Both free 2 play. Both not EA- or Activision-owned. May not be your style, but I've met the developers of both games and was impressed by their willingness to have open two-way dialog with the gamer base. IMO, people are tired of spending $50 for a retail game, being forced to pay a subscription fee, and then finding out after a short while that the game isn't at all what was expected. Free 2 play can still offer gaming companies large profit margins while putting out quality work. A publicly traded company is always going to put the stockholder's interest in mind, not the game play experience.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
After Valve has proven with three titles now (L4D, L4D2, Portal 2), a spring release can still be extremely profitable.
FYI: L4D and L4D2 were both Q4 releases (November 2008/2009, respectively). They often have major sales via Steam in the springtime to boost their numbers, as well as various holidays and seasons as well. Perhaps this is where you got mixed up.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
Whoops! You are correct, sir. My apologies. I think they had a 50% off sale on L4D in early spring and then did a press release about how dropping the price of a game inside of a year can significantly boost overall sales numbers. That's probably what I am thinking of.
moox. for a new generation.
Its a pity this game looks fucking terrible. That $100M could have been used to make several new Dark Forces games.
Personally, I hope the game does great. I think more choices for MMORPGs is great. However, I would like to point out a problem that exists with the industry, and that's that any problem that occurs right from the start can doom a project forever. An MMO has pretty much one chance to make it, and if it doesn't succeed right out of the gate, it's going to move at a snail pace until the owners finally cancel it. Bioware has a lot riding on this because they're taking an intellectual property that failed miserably in the past and has actually become the standard of how to destroy an MMO (Star Wars Galaxies did so many things wrong that they teach it in computer business classes now). Therefore, Bioware needs it to be a massive hit right out of the gate, or it will fail horribly. The fan base of an MMO can so easily launch it into the stratosphere or doom it to obscurity forever, and it will happen overnight.
Sarbonn's blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/blog
If you only played through a single instance or did a single quest once ever this would make sense for an MMO, but thats just not the way it works. You're going to do the same instances over and over and if you've already been there you probably wont want to hear the story segments again.
This has the added negative effect of making the game inaccessible for people who join later. If you start playing 3 months in everyone is going to insist on skipping all of the cut-scenes in instances because they're sick of them, so you won't be able to get any of the group story that Bioware is claiming is so great.
Great. . . another crappy Star Wars game. I miss when Lucasarts was responsible for good games. X-Wing, TIE Figher, Rebel Assault, Dark Forces I & II, Sam & Max, Outlaws, Full Throttle, Indiana Jones & The Fate of Atlantis, etc.
Not only this, but also "how many months/years of subscription required by these people"?
This is an MMO, if it goes into a classic "many buyers who do not sign up for game time after their trial that came with purchase period is up", I suspect even a several million sales would fall short of paying for it.
MMOs live and die by subscriptions. Not by copy sales. We have a boatload of failed WoW-killers that had a lot of initial sales, but almost no people signing up for more time.
On a personal note, the more I read about this game, the more I think that it's doomed to fail by design. A plot-based game is good for one playthrough - after this, you're done with it. Meaning you'll buy a copy, play through the game and be done with it. You'd have to patch in new content (and by extension, new plot lines) at an incredible pace to keep people interested. I suspect that even blizzard with its incredibly polished development machine could not pull that kind of development speed off.
You're not supposed to make multiple playthroughs unless you are an altoholic.
The game will live or die by its ability to sustain play after max level is reached.
I know that I'll be rushing to get there, and when I'm there, I expect the game to really unfold; multiple instances, battlegrounds, gear that leaves me dreaming for months before obtaining it et cetera. If I get there and nothing happens, I will not pay further suscriptions.
I cannot imagine that this is different for other people. Most of those I've played with in MMO's stick to one character. It's really only realm changes or side changes that forces them into making a new one. Those few that did like multiple characters often burned out; they got left behind, and the only fun they could then have was the story, which they would repeat until tired of it and thus quits.
Really another one, in a market that is saturated with MMOs? Couldn't they of used that $100 million for something useful like giving us a finished version of KotOR 2?
Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted.
On a personal note, the more I read about this game, the more I think that it's doomed to fail by design. A plot-based game is good for one playthrough - after this, you're done with it. Meaning you'll buy a copy, play through the game and be done with it. You'd have to patch in new content (and by extension, new plot lines) at an incredible pace to keep people interested. I suspect that even blizzard with its incredibly polished development machine could not pull that kind of development speed off.
Well the Lord of the Rings Online is "plot-based" and is doing alright especially since going free-to-play / micropayments. The plot is a series of epic quests arranged in books & chapters that you can play more or less as soon as your level is high enough. It hasn't even reached The Return of the King yet so they have plenty ways to go and string it out further, probably an expansion or two at least. I imagine a Star Wars game doesn't even that limitation to be concerned about.
WoW's plot exists and for the solo leveling it is important, but there are other draws as well. PvP and daily quests keep the game interesting and playable without belaboring the story.
WoW has great balance between plot based and non-plot based content. That balance is critical. And unfortunately, keeping teams of writers and developers on staff to maintain that balance is expensive.
I never have understood why game publishers historically shoot for a Christmas release date. When I was growing up my parents, friends, nor extended family ever bought me a single video game. It's too complicated to shop for games for someone else, especially when it's a PC game
As a kid I usually took a handful of my Christmas money out the day after Christmas and bought myself a game or two. It is hard to buy games for someone else, but game purchases still increase around the holidays.
How much of this 'cost' is Lucas getting in licensing fees?
On the one hand you're saying that TOR is going to awesome becasue you played it for 20 minutes at a con, on the other you're saying that loads of your friends liked Rift initially and got bored when they hit endgame. Do you see the contradiction here? Lots of games have stories, WoW's story is reasonably compelling (not great literature by any means, but reasonably compelling) if you read the quests and pay attention to what you're doing. One of Blizzard's main fiction producers is Christie Golden, who is also one of the main Star Wars novel producers. She's a moderately talented writer (I won't call her an author exactly, she doesn't write her own stories, just fleshes out the stories her editors give her) who produces reasonably entertaining stories for both universes. That's really the best you can hope to get for any mass market entertainment series like SW or Warcraft.
The problem with "story" based games as MMOs (and this is a problem that WoW is facing more and more now that they've streamlined the questing system) is that once the "story" is played out.. then what? Why am I paying you next month? How fast will the story be progressing? Faster than I can play through? Doubtful. Faster than some no-lifer who plays 16 hours a day can play through? Almost impossible.
I'll give TOR a shot, don't get me wrong. I'd love to be proven wrong here. We'll see what happens.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
The game has cinematic NPC interactions in the style of Mass Effect and Dragon Age. There are no text popups. An example of a quest in the empire has a father ask you to assassinate his politically inconvenient daughter. The interaction conveys non-verbally that he isn't very sure about his course of action. When you get to the daughter, you interact with her and at the end you can kill her or capture her. If you kill her you'll get paid, if you capture her and bring her to her father he is very happy that you didn't do as asked. In a way that is just a quest to go kill someone, but only in the same way that Lord of the Rings is a story about someone fetching a ring and throwing it into someplace.
NO.
The Penis is Evil. The GUN is GOOD.
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
EAperture Science
Do MMOs need to be 10 year spanning projects? I'm comfortable with the idea of an MMO being launched and canceled in 2 years. We've already played the game, know its mechanics, etc why keep it on life support via raising level caps and expansions forever?
I'd love to live in a world where new and unique MMOs were launched every year instead of this kind of one-size-fits all Skinner box McDonaldization that Blizzard is so good at.
>On a personal note, the more I read about this game, the more I think that it's doomed to fail by design.
Look, if you want to keep playing the same old WoW, then go ahead and do that, but don't begrudge those who are trying something new.
Your family sucks. My family, I'd give my Mom a list of games I wanted in the order I wanted them and my family would work their way down the list.
Is it really going to be that new though?
I mean... when are MMOs going to ACTUALLY try to change up gameplay? Story-driven missions and stuff are great, but what about some other form of targeting/using abilities? Is this still going to be a click-on-the-target, enable auto-attack, cast spell 1 followed by spell 2 followed by spell 3 and repeat?
Why aren't there more MMOs that mix in puzzles or platforming elements? Wouldn't it be cool if there was a sort of RTS mechanic? This whole "watch your casting bar fill up thing" and "global cooldown" on abilities is getting old, and it seems like it's on every single MMO now (why? because WoW did it?).
At the very least, I hope that crafting is more than "get raw materials, forge raw materials into usable components by waiting for a bar to fill up, craft items by watch said bar fill up some more, alt-tab while you craft 50 medium leathers, etc." Why not have a mini-game for crafting? Why not actually be able to combine various components with various properties to achieve the effects that you want? Morrowind/Oblivion had a great way of doing this in their Alchemy skill.
I want to like this game, I really do. If they can prove that their core gameplay mechanics are different, then I will be very excited, but if not, I'll just be very bored. Again.
I am really hoping this will be good as a star wars fan and an Ex-Wow addict. However, and take this with the requisite grain of salt, I've heard from two different people working on this project that it's got alot of issues and they don't have alot of hope it will turn out great. They complain there is way too much focus on things like voice acting for every single character and not enough on gameplay and combat. It's supposedly not even in alpha testing internally so I doubt we'll see it this year, unless they rush it which I really hope they don't
Why would dailies make you quit? They are always completely optional and just there for people who want to sink time into getting a toy.
KOTOR I and II were 2 of the best RPGs I have played. True that KOTOR 2's ending was botched up, but then it wasn't released by Bioware. I am really excited about this game - I haven't found a really good RPG recently after Witcher. Mass Effect and Dragon Age wasn't that good in my opinion.
For the good of all of us, except the ones who are customers/employees/acquirable competitors.
The puzzles, etc. DDO tried... but they quickly get reported to sites and people go to the web to look up the solution. Sure, you can ignore the web, but you'll find yourself kicked from a group for messing up the puzzle and/or not knowing the answer or methodology for killing that boss.
RTS would be neat. We had a discussion with the Vanguard devs in early beta about the necromancer being a massive number of pet class (zerging necro?) and they later scrapped it because the necro had too much of a chance to get away from possible death if they took on too much (on purpose/accident.) I'd actually like to see someone take the route of towns demanding items from players or being overrun and lost. I'd also like to see these towns kick out settlers that need to be protected with excess equipment from these towns to build new settlements.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
needs to deliver 45 wombat hides
Hey! Don't you confuse us with those nasty rodents, womprats. Our hides may not be as nice, but we smell better.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
No, Mom. I don't have a WII. I have an XBox 360. This is the WII version of the game. See? The list says, quite explicitly, "XBOX 360 VERSIONS ONLY." Now I'll have to exchange this.
And this is a PC game. The only PC here is your laptop, and you don't want me using that any more than I want to try to play this game on that non-gaming piece of crap.
You know what, Mom? Just give me cash next year.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I watched a couple videos of this game. Honestly it's going to fail for one reason:
Lightsabers don't actually cut through stuff.
Who wants to play a game where you have to beat someone about the head a dozen times with your lightsaber before they die of a concussion?
G.
I mean... when are MMOs going to ACTUALLY try to change up gameplay? Story-driven missions and stuff are great, but what about some other form of targeting/using abilities? Is this still going to be a click-on-the-target, enable auto-attack, cast spell 1 followed by spell 2 followed by spell 3 and repeat?
Sadly, yes. Because other targeting methods don't work well when your clients have pings in the 150-300ms range.
So unless you want to limit your players where they will only get good play if they live within say 1500km of the server and their ping times are below 50ms, then you need to plan on 150-300ms input delays and real-time targeting doesn't work that well.
(I don't know whether other MMO shooters used non-select targeting. I just remember the hell of having a 50+ ms ping back when I played online FPS shooters circa 2004. Under 50ms was great, under 30ms was godly. Above 100ms was laggy.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
+1
It gets even worse when you do something stupid like Blizzard and put a few random people into your group, who you've never met, don't come from the same server, and who you'll never see again.
(Ugh, I hate random cross-server LFG. Greater Internet Fuckwad theory in action.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I know that I'll be rushing to get there...
This always confused me when I used to play WoW. Why rush? I always enjoyed the exploration and seeing the story (and in WoW effects of the previous games on the world). Half the people I know rush to the end, and once they're there do the same repetitive tasks and grinding over and over and over just for a shiny thing that lets other players know how "awesome" they are, and perhaps unlock other equally repetitive tasks for other equally pointless rewards. You don't even get to experiement with your character anymore, since there are exactly 3 builds per class, and each one needs the exact same items as everyone else.
And from what I read, they made this even worse now.
I generally quit WoW for a couple months after my main hit the level cap, and I hit a couple low level raids. Then I'd fall back in love (obsession) once I got my free time and rolled a decent alt, only to quit once I realized that it stops being a game after the cap, and turns into a job again.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Hey! Don't you put down us womprats! We're people too! But we're treated like scum. I know a guy who used to bullseye womprats in his T-16 back home, even the poor baby ones that are not much bigger than two meters.
I want to know how much it will cost before they break even, they imply 350,000 accounts, is that from day one with a game bought and a month played? 3 months played? 6 months played? My poor marketing skills suggest purchases and a month payed for would make them about 20 million. So I guess those numbers implied some months payed for to offset the cost. I have no doubt it will succeed but I think the MMO movement is hitting it's plateau period. There will be new players at a steady rate but the meteoric rise that happened over WoW I doubt we'll see again. The hourly and appointed time consumption is a killer compared to other forms of entertainment. Then again I could be absolutely wrong, I don't doubt the game will be wonderful but being an adult seeking to start a family this game will never be for me.
is the use of Light Sabres. Otherwise, it's just some random sci-fi genre game with pretty hairstyles and face paint.
While Star Trek and Dr Who retained/reclaimed their original appeal over many iterations, I find it very strange how Star Wars - at least as ubiquitous and seemingly immutable - so quickly and carelessly mutated into something completely unrecognisable and utterly unappealing to those who loved the original.
One of the great tragedies of modern film culture in my mind.
Vendetta Online's FPS-style ship combat seems to have handled this issue quite nicely. My latency is usually around 120 to 150 and I have no trouble hitting what I'm aiming at. Essentially, you select your target, and a floating reticule pops up that factors in the relative movements (and in the case of PvP, the latency of both players as well) of both you and your target, and tells you where you 'should' be aiming for your shots to hit; it's then up to you to actually hit that point. Not always as easy as it sounds, especially against other players, but it works out very nicely.
Granted, the rest of the game and its universe is quite drab and boring, with very little depth, but at the very least it stands as a good example of how FPS-style aiming in an MMO can work well.
It's the kind of situation that the bounty hunter Boba Fett might encounter, and indeed it is a bounty hunter quest. Bounty hunter is one of the classes you can play on the empire side. There are 8 classes in all, and the only one of them that is not based on an iconic character from the original movies is the Imperial Agent. He is more of a James Bond type of guy. I called the OP out because he was criticizing TOR for it's story, which is perhaps the one element of this game that is doubtlessly very well made. The rest may or may not be - it remains to be seen, though previews are generally favorable. The one glaring issue is that no information has come out about the end-game yet, which is kind of important to an MMO.
You are not alone, at least. This was always my main attraction to WoW... exploring the lore and the places I'd visited or possibly destroyed in old games. I don't have an addictive enough personality to play it for the in-game perks and rewards and shininess, it has to be a personal interest in the content and story. That's actually a reason I'm not that into MMOs, as I like a story with an ending, where the things you do actually affect the world. The cataclysm expansion added a little bit of the world changing, but the story still doesn't have any form of ending or closure because that's not how you keep subscribers.
If you're competing with raiders, badges from dailies are utterly useless to you. They're aimed at casual crowd that doesn't do raiding, so that they can get their shinies too (albeit at a much slower pace).
They are also there to grant some bling-bling stuff like mounts and pets and weird items like banners. None of it really matters for gameplay.
The game could have been 25% better.
Breakeven possibly as low as 350,000 subscribers? Spending $100M, that means they expect each user to spend an average of $285.71 on the game. Wha? Even at 500,000, it's $200 per player.
Words, words, words
One of WoW's main competitor at launch was EQ1, not to mention 2 and Guild Wars, which in all seriousness wasn't a real threat. EQ1 was because there were fully established raiding guilds in it and it was a real gamble at the time to jump ships to something else. Even EQ2 had to compete with EQ1, and lost to a large degree. EQ2 is free to play and EQ1 people are still willing to pay for 12 years later. MMOs are about raids and that's it. Maybe for friendship for a brief period of time, but other than that you're wasting your money.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.