Aug 18, 2011

Posted by in News | 12 Comments

Launch Copies Of The Old Republic To Be Limited Across The Board

Last month when Electronic Arts officially announced that Star Wars: The Old Republic was available for pre-order, fans rejoiced! The pre-order program went on to break all of EA’s records, and fans knew that to nab a Collector’s Edition, they’d have to act fast!

Well, that seems to be the order of business for ANY edition that you’re planning to buy.

Game Informer is reporting that copies of the game – digital as well as physical – will be limited to a specific (and secret) number:

The representative said that EA has an exact number set for how many copies will be sold before the publisher turns off digital sales, but they aren’t going to share that number. If it is hit, the publisher will be working non-stop to expand its server capabilities as quickly as possible so the game can once again be open to new players. However, the representative was unsure if this would take hours, weeks, or as long as a month.

This supports the original reasoning behind BioWare’s decision to limit the general availability geographically as well, stating that they want to provide a high-quality service and these steps were necessary to assure that.

So, let this serve as your heads-up: If you’re waiting for some reason, and haven’t pre-ordered yet, you may want to rethink your strategy. This is one game of chicken you don’t want to lose!

  1. ScytheNoire says:

    If it means better service for those who pre-ordered and the game will be playable at launch, I’m all for this. It is artificial scarcity, which I hate, but there is a reasoning for it, making sure the servers don’t implode and ruin it for everyone.

    • I would rather see this method over what Blizzard had with the launch of WoW in ’04. They did not expect the demand to be so large, and the servers could barley contain the population.

      If you know that you only have so many servers to support x-players comfortably, I see no problem in limiting the launch. The game will still be there a week down the road.

  2. My post was deleted. :O

  3. Kremlin KOA says:

    And you support this decision? Shame on you.

  4. This could go either way, hinder sales or increase demand.

  5. It is one of those, damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

    Consider this though, world wide they have what 1-1,5 million pre-orders? Now you try and guess just how many servers they will need for launch when adding day 1-2 sales :)

    I mean I am just guessing but securing the hardware to account for your ~half million pre orders and guestimate worked so well for rift, who admitted that their launch surprised them, add on star wars logo, and i think its fair to say, all bets are off.

  6. I am not sure how this will effect the long term health of the game though. From this blurb, can we say that if pre-sale hit the upper limit close to release that there won’t be many copies (physical or digital)available for the release. Not everyone who wants to play SWTOR is pre-ordering. How about the casual gamers who are only going to pick it up on the shelf? I’m not in favot of anything that restricts casual as that’s where EA will make a lot of profit.

  7. They said they would have limited quantities for launch at the SDCC back in July. They were so excited to tell us what we were getting for going to the SWTOR panel that I though we were going to get beta invites or something. We got a pre-order code for the SE…..

    I normally wait until launch to buy, I’m not a fan of pre-orders. This worked on me though, I pre-ordered the same week they announced it was available :).

    It will be interesting to see if they hit whatever cap they have made for themselves and actually stop selling the game prior to launch. Maybe after an official release date is announced AAJ can setup a pool to see when/if the pre-orders stop selling :).

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