Electronic Arts’ Chief Financial Officer Eric Brown believes that Star Wars: The Old Republic has the potential to run for at least ten years. He also claims that the MMO won’t depend on millions of subscribers.
Speaking at the UBS Annual Media and Communications Conference in New York, he commented that “We think we can run and operate a very successful and profitable MMO at different levels. The key thing here is to really perfect the product. We’re shooting for an extremely high quality game experience. We view this as a ten-year opportunity.”
The Old Republic has previously come under fire from several sources.
The “EA Louse”, an anonymous BioWare developer, lashed out at the game and his employers in October of this year. Their scathing post slammed BioWare’s apparent pride in their sound and voiceover work above all else, claiming “the rest of the game is a joke” and that “Old Republic will be one of the greatest failures in the history of MMOs from EA. Probably at the level of The Sims Online. We all know it too.”
And during the London Games Conference in November of this year, Bigpoint CEO Heiko Hubertz said that he believed the game’s ballooning budget and reliance on subscriptions was bad news. “This is an online game for many millions of subscribers,” he said, “So the publisher does not understand that a subscription model is not the future. With micro-transactions, maybe I see the game having a chance but I don’t think that EA or BioWare will ever be profitable with this game.”
However, Brown commented that “[EA's] assumptions for break-even and profitability are not seven-digit subscribers.” What does this mean, though? A microtransaction-based model, as Hubertz suggests? Regular paid expansion packs?
It remains to be seen. But EA certainly seem quietly confident about the whole thing. The Old Republic‘s rather different nature to typical MMORPGs means that a lot of people who are not interested in titles such as World of Warcraft are curious about it. And the Star Wars license, coupled with BioWare’s involvement, mean that there are a lot of consumers looking forward to it, too.
We’ll find out if this confidence is justified in the springtime of next year!
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