… and Age of Conan, for that matter.
As a games journalist, he's only re-writing what he saw first on Kotaku anyway.
EA announced during their earnings call that Star Wars: The Old Republic had sold over 2 million boxes and had 1.7 million subscribed players, beating EA’s internal projections. A lot of sources took that at face value as a great result, but was it?
Let’s look at EA Mythic’s Warhammer Online (WAR) and Funcom’s Age of Conan (AoC) as comparison points, given they were big MMO launches of a similar nature:
- WAR shipped 1.5 million boxes to retailers, sold 1.2 million to players and had an active player base of 800k at launch.
- AoC shipped 1.2 million boxes according to their earnings report, and had 800k of those copies activated by players (page 2 of that linked report).
I haven’t matched up time periods exactly – EA made their SWOR announcement roughly 6 weeks following SWOR’s launch, WAR’s figures look to have been made 12 days after launch and AoC’s figures come from roughly 4 – 6 weeks following that title’s launch. But it works as a rough comparison.
So although SWOR has been successful, it is certainly in the same ball park as WAR and AoC, especially when you take the estimated development budgets (SWOR: US$200m, WAR: “south of US$100m”; AoC: not disclosed, but US$40m – US$80m is very possible given that Funcom needed US$30m in additional funding less than a year before launch).
Other interesting points to note are:
- All those titles had phenomenal sales within the first two weeks of launch. SWOR hit the million mark in 3 days, WAR hit the million-plus sales mark in 12 days and AoC shipped (not sold) over 1 million copies for 700k active subscibers in that first month.
- Somewhere between 15% and 30% of these sales are to people who don’t subscribe to the game immediately. I’m guessing that’s a lot of gifts, collector’s editions, bonus copies, games-I’ll-play-later, oops-my-PC-can’t-run-this and impulse purchases in there. But that’s a significant portion of box sales that aren’t generating subscription revenue.
Anyway, my view on this is that in isolation SWOR’s sales look good… but put them next to other MMOs of a similar nature and considering the amount of hype and investment involved, they don’t seem out of line with what you’d expect to see – neither really above or below, but on par. I’d pretty much guarantee that there are people in EA mumbling, “SWOR is our most expensive game ever, and it only sold 2 million boxes? Battlefield 3 sold 10m copies at launch!” rather than popping champagne corks over SWOR’s performance.
... and this is the level that AoC pitches at today.
(Yes, SWOR is PC-exclusive while Battlefield 3 is multi-platform, but “most expensive game ever created at EA” and US$200m in development costs is a great leveller when it comes to sales expectations.)
The challenge now for SWOR is to hold onto those players and earn that subscription revenue – something that WAR and AoC both failed to do.
World Class Villains 
Just to make a point. The 12/31/2011 sales were 1.76 million. Of which 1.7 million had activated their accounts and were just, at the most, 10-days into the first month. EA deliberately conflated that meaningless subscription number with the 2.0 million January 31st sales figure to give the impression of a higher than normal retention rate. Obviously, as a CPA, I saw through that trick immediately. Unfortunately, the press and the vast majority of gamers did not so EA got away with it.
What EA hasn’t released since the meaningless 12/31/2011 numbers is current subs. They will, of course, have to disclose them. They’re publicly traded and the March 31st FYE is almost upon us… However, being a CPA and an experienced modeler/forecaster… It’s pretty easy to see from the available third-party information coordinated with known performance profiles and cross-referenced against both known sales information and similar game sales profiles while using Court Approved indirect-method analysis.
My conclusion is that people will be fired over this game. In the executive ranks. This dog is looking so bad that it may take over a decade to fully break even, though once revenues exceed direct costs they’ll declare victory. Games cost more than developer capitalizedable direct costs. There’s a lot of sales & marketing, manufacturing and distribution, never mind the royalties and the ever present over-head that was expensed to make this game.
It’s like the movies. A $100 million movie, direct expense, will cost at least another $50 million for prints and advertising. And that doesn’t include it’s ‘share’ of studio over-head costs or percentage-of-the-gross. Which can run more than direct costs by a wide margin.
Oops, sorry for the delay in approving the comment. Been exceptionally busy.
Agreed. EA BioWare were given a (near) blank cheque, swung for the fences and have delivered somethng that isn’t going to hold players. They may become the second-biggest MMO in the West for a while, but that isn’t a true success given their development budget.
EA will attempt to hide SWOR’s performance by opening in new markets for a while (like they did with WAR), but there are some embarrassing disclosures incoming.
And I’m betting on a cash shop before the first full year of SWOR is through.