[MMO] Is EA ever patient?

ScytheRexx · May 22, 2012

So I was making my website rounds when I noticed a post about SWTOR. I keep up with the game because I would like to see if it ever goes F2P, but even my desire for it to go F2P never makes this a welcome sight.
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=4435219#edit4435219

Hey folks, since you’re reading this you may likely have heard that we’ve done some restructuring here on the SWTOR team. Sadly, we are bidding farewell to some talented, passionate and exceptionally hard-working people who helped make SWTOR a reality. Impacting people’s lives this way is always very hard, but we’re ensuring the affected people are treated with dignity, fairness and respect.

Looking back at launch, we all came together and did something historic. We executed one of the largest, most successful and stable launches of any MMO yet in industry history. That is not an easy feat for any development team or company and we are humbled and honored by our fan community’s strong support both at launch and beyond.

Looking forward, the studio remains vibrant and passionate about our many upcoming initiatives for Star Wars: The Old Republic. We still have a very substantial development team working on supporting and growing the game, and we feel we are in a strong position, with your continued involvement and feedback, to continue to build Star Wars: The Old Republic as one of the most compelling and successful online experiences in the world today. There are many strong initiatives planned for cool new content and new features that we’re excited to tell you about in the upcoming weeks and months.

Rest assured that we remain dedicated to delivering a high quality service in SWTOR to you, our fans, and we will continue to support and grow Star Wars: The Old Republic over the weeks, months and years to come.

Rumors are already flying around, so it is hard to say who actually left, but the largest and most backed rumors is that they fired the class writing team, basically the people that made all those personalized class quests you do throughout the game. If that is the case then fuck EA, that was the best part of the game for me when I did the trial.

This just makes me wonder though, is EA ever patient? The game has not even been out a YEAR yet, not even a year, and they are already laying people off that were big enough that they had to post about it. Didn't this happen to Warhammer Online too? All this and the Mass Effect diasco and... God fuck EA right up the damn ass.

Dave · May 22, 2012

Now that development is completed they can drop paychecks to save money. Later when they need it they'll hire others at lesser wages. After all, they are only adding content, not writing it, right?

Bowielee · May 22, 2012

So, you're asking if a company that shuts down its servers for most games in less than 6 months of a game's release is impatient?

Yeah, EA generally sucks the bag.

Gared · May 22, 2012

Well, now that the game is out, they don't need people to write class specific questlines, right? I mean, it's not like they're ever going to need to expand any of those quest lines, or do any expansions, or add classes to the game. And even if they do, they can just get someone ~~cheaper~~ even more better qualified, or promote someone from an internal team who's been doing an awesome job of placing trees and bushes in the digital landscape.

Yeah, EA is probably screwing themselves (and their audience) yet again, by going for the fast and easy cash now rather than wait until a long-term investment pays off. But if all of their past foibles haven't taught them anything, this won't either.

Edit: Damn, ninja'd by Dave.

Bubble181 · May 22, 2012

I don't understand it. They KNOW the only thing everyone liked about SWTOR were the class specific quests. That's....Those are the guys you should KEEP! Fire the idiots who came up with the things players don't like, no?

Everybody wants the money WoW makes now, but nobody is willing to keep working at it and start relatively small, as Blizz did. WoW may have grown big very fast, it still didn't start out with 15 million subscribers and 5 staff members.

@Li3n · May 22, 2012

They don't need to, see "them still being in business"...

Tehy way they burn through devs is a damn shame.

Frank · May 22, 2012

and

GasBandit · May 22, 2012

Add this to that list:

Frank · May 22, 2012

Oh yeah, good one I had missed.

CynicismKills · May 22, 2012

As someone who took a couple chars to the cap and tried to raid/PvP, yes, the storylines are the best part of the game (granted I didn't try the 1.2 addition zones). Guess we'll see how this turns out, but it sure doesn't sound good.

Bubble181 · May 23, 2012

Bullfrog, Maxis, Westwood, Blizzard and BlueByte were my absolute favourites way back when. BlueByte's jsut a name Ubisoft slaps on some of their crap now, Blizzard of today is as much like Blizzard of the old times as modern EA is like the EA who gave us Tie Fighter. All the rest's been buried by EA. Such a shame

ScytheRexx · May 23, 2012

To be fair, Maxis is still doing well for a studio, the problem is all EA wants them to make now is The Sims.

How long has it been since the last SimCity? They just finally announced a new one, and I bet on my life at some point it's going to be dumbed down so they can fit some Sims styling in it, that is why Societies ended up a piece of junk.

I really miss Bullfrog, I still remember playing Theme Park and Theme Hospital.

Bubble181 · May 23, 2012

ScytheRexx said:
To be fair, Maxis is still doing well for a studio, the problem is all EA wants them to make now is The Sims.

How long has it been since the last SimCity? They just finally announced a new one, and I bet on my life at some point it's going to be dumbed down so they can fit some Sims styling in it, that is why Societies ended up a piece of junk.

I really miss Bullfrog, I still remember playing Theme Park and Theme Hospital.

They've already announced that the enxt SimCity, like the last one but even more so, is going to be an MMO. "No city will be able to prosper on its own, because that isn't realistic". So those trolls who f*ck up your online gaming experience? They're the guys you'll need to buy your power, or coal, or food, or whatever from. Enjoy. I don't understand: the last one was a flop because of it! Eh.

Me, I'm still waiting for a remake of SimAnt.

HowDroll · May 23, 2012

I cancelled my SWTOR account after the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle; I had decided EA was not a company I wanted to give my money to anymore.

This makes me feel really, really good about that decision.

SeraRelm · May 23, 2012

I kind of did the same, HowDroll. I'm still interested in Secret World though.

HowDroll · May 23, 2012

SeraRelm said:
I kind of did the same, HowDroll. I'm still interested in Secret World though.

It's been years since I've been truly impressed by a MMO, so I'm having a hard time anticipating anything

I agree that Secret World does look interesting, though. We shall see.

EA, I want to love you. I want to throw piles of money at you. Please, please stop being so evil.

Shegokigo · May 23, 2012

HowDroll - I know exactly what you mean. My brother recently started playing Tera Online and is liking it, I spent 10mins with it and wasn't "moved" enough to get a copy. WoW's combat system feels dated as all hell but I still love the lore so it keeps my sub. I'm finally playing more single player games thankfully, none of them EA based on the bright side.

SeraRelm · May 23, 2012

To be honest, I mostly played SW:TOR as a single player game with some multiplayer chat. That wasn't enough to keep me.

Shegokigo · May 23, 2012

That's exactly what happened to me with SW:TOR as well. Was loving the single player storyline but the very flat combat just couldn't keep me for 50 levels.

ScytheRexx · May 23, 2012

Pretty much what happened to me. It's why I want it to go F2P so I can just enjoy the storylines at my own pace without worrying about paying a monthly fee for it, because I know once I finish up the stories I will likely stop playing.

AshburnerX · May 23, 2012

I'm still enjoying it, but mainly because of the people I get to do stuff with. I'm subbed until at least July/August, depending on when my free "loyalty" month kicks in. 1.3 will be out by then, and hopefully we'll get some details on 1.4 (the next content update).

It's not a bad game, it's just still very... formative. It doesn't have the huge amount of content that City of Heroes or WoW have due to being around for years, nor does it have all the functionality those games have. But those things ARE still being added and the game still has lots of potential, mainly due to the strength of the franchise behind it.

That being said, yeah... it's a dumb move for EA, but the SWTOR was already a giant, bloated beast. They absorbed near entire companies into it to make release. People were going to be let go eventually.

Necronic · May 23, 2012

Does anyone know what the player counts have looked like since launch?

Ed: I never played SWTOR but everyone I knew from EvE that played it heavily quit after the first 5 months or so. If this is indicative of their general player count then I'm not surprised that they are shutting down servers/firing people. Game was a bust and they are trying to salvage as much as they can out of it.

Gared · May 23, 2012

MMOData.net reports Q4 earnings from EA as noting that there were (at that time) 1.3M subs, down from 1.7M in February.

Personally, I just couldn't get into the game as an MMO. It seemed like a great single player game, but I didn't want to keep paying $15 a month to play a single player game... which is kind of ridiculous of me, since right now I'm paying my $15 a month WoW sub just so I can play D3 for free. They lost my wife's sub because we were tired of her getting charged every 28 days, instead of every 30.

AshburnerX · May 23, 2012

It's at like 1.3 million at last count. That's hardly bad... I know City of Heroes survived for years with far less than that.

And yeah... I kind of feel like SWTOR was released a year too early. If they had that extra year, they'd have more post-50 content and the Ranked Warzones would be ready. They need to get the Ranked Warzones out ASAP... on servers with huge faction pop differences, it's hard to get the wins you need for your weekly, meaning it's hard to grind up for your Battlemaster/War Hero gear. On my server this means that just about everyone the Repubs have has full War Hero, while the Imps are lucky to even have a full team of Battlemasters.

ElJuski · May 23, 2012

*just caught up with StarCraft 2

computers are doing what now?

Gared · May 23, 2012

ElJuski said:
*just caught up with StarCraft 2

computers are doing what now?

Skynet

Bubble181 · May 23, 2012

*shrug* It was a predicted failure. KOTOR fans were clamoring for a sequel; EA wanted in on that sweet, sweet money WoW brings in, so they made it an MMO even when each and every fan site pretty much said they didn't want it. So they got an MMO that practically everyone I know or I've heard about who's played it, played it like a single player game. Guess what? If people play your single player RPG for 5 months, that's a pretty rad game. But once they're finished with the "Star Wars" bit, they're out.

GasBandit · May 24, 2012

Bubble181 said:
*shrug* It was a predicted failure. KOTOR fans were clamoring for a sequel; EA wanted in on that sweet, sweet money WoW brings in, so they made it an MMO even when each and every fan site pretty much said they didn't want it. So they got an MMO that practically everyone I know or I've heard about who's played it, played it like a single player game. Guess what? If people play your single player RPG for 5 months, that's a pretty rad game. But once they're finished with the "Star Wars" bit, they're out.

Man, just cut and paste "elder scrolls" in place of "star wars" and "Skyrim" in for "KOTOR" and you'd be a very canny prognosticator.

Gryfter · May 24, 2012

Bubble181 said:
*shrug* It was a predicted failure. KOTOR fans were clamoring for a sequel; EA wanted in on that sweet, sweet money WoW brings in, so they made it an MMO even when each and every fan site pretty much said they didn't want it. So they got an MMO that practically everyone I know or I've heard about who's played it, played it like a single player game. Guess what? If people play your single player RPG for 5 months, that's a pretty rad game. But once they're finished with the "Star Wars" bit, they're out.

It's sad that in this day and age of MMOs, a game that only has 1.3 million subs is considered a failure.

It sucks that people got laid off but it's certainly not unusual for an MMO to reduce the size of their development team post launch. It's happened to a lot of MMOs, most recently with Rift and that game isn't dead despite the doomsayers that tolled the end of the game when Trion had layoffs at the 3 month mark.

Still playing SWTOR and enjoying it mostly because I have a group to play with regularly. Though I have to say, the 4 player group size sucks. It's the one thing my friends and I complain about the most as there are regularly 5 of us playing at any given time. Sucks having to split into smaller group to do the same content. That said, if it's true that the story team was hit the hardest and they are going to phase the story out then the game will lose interest for me pretty fast.

Shegokigo · May 24, 2012

Story is about the only thing SWTOR does better than most of it's competition. Going to be a shame to see that drop.

ScytheRexx · May 24, 2012

Gryfter said:
It's sad that in this day and age of MMOs, a game that only has 1.3 million subs is considered a failure.

It is very true. While looking up more information on this whole fiasco I actually noticed this said in an older earning call. Be aware this was when they were sitting at 1.7 million.

Q: You've previously said you need about a half million subscribers to be profitable, is that still the case?
A: At 500,000 subscribers, we'd break even. At a million, we'd be making a profit but nothing worth writing home about. As it scales up from there, we're talking about a nice profit. At this point with the successful launch, we can take the worst case scenarios off the table.

With losing 400k subscribers since this earnings call, I can see them getting restless considering it brings them closer to 1 million, which as they said, is "nothing to write home about" as far as profits go. They likely don't want to get anywhere near just "breaking even", which used to be a healthy subscription amount back in the day, so anywhere near 500k would likely be death for the game in the eyes of EA.

GasBandit · May 24, 2012

In other news, EA considers, what is by their reckoning, 7.5 million dollars of pure "after breaking even" profit per month to be "nothing to write home about."

Bubble181 · May 24, 2012

Depends. I assume that there are *some* extra costs associated with extra subscribers. Extra servers, extra power usage, extra moderators/admins,...
Still, 2/3 of ti should be pure profit.

AshburnerX · May 24, 2012

Yeah, but they can reduce costs by merging servers... which kinda needs to happen anyways because some servers (like mine) have very low populations.

@Li3n · May 24, 2012

Gryfter said:
It's sad that in this day and age of MMOs, a game that only has 1.3 million subs is considered a failure.

Which is funny considering that only one mmo actually has numbers that go above 2 mil, while most hover around 1 mil or less...

But hey, you should totally base a business on statistically improbable odds... what could go wrong.