Posted by Lethality | 4 Comments

Up To 1.5 Million Players Already Online + The Doctors Ring In NASDAQ

Computers And Video Games is reporting that Star Wars: The Old Republic may already have 1.5 million players already queuing up to play the game (as if you didn’t notice ;) Cowen & Company analyst Doug Creutz had this to say:

Based on the number of servers now in operation, and the relatively high densities thereon, we feel fairly comfortable estimating that the game already has in excess of 1 million players, and potentially could have as many as 1.5 million

He goes on to estimate that this is about 29% of the total number of servers that Blizzard operates for World of Warcraft. He also notes that the population density of TOR servers (relative to server capacity) appears to be greater than that of WoW servers.

Off to a great start? I’d say so. Biggest (and Smoothest). Launch. Ever.

In other awesome launch day news for Electronics Arts, BioWare Co-Founders Dr. Greg Zeschuk and Dr. Ray Muzyka were on Wall Street this morning to ring the opening bell and usher in the trading day for the NASDAQ exchange.

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Posted by Momus | 3 Comments

Electronic Arts CFO Claims 2 Million Beta Testers – 725,000 Over Thanksgiving

In an article over at Gamespot, Electronic Arts CFO Eric Brown is quoted during the annual Global Media and Communications Conference in New York as saying that TOR attracted 2 million unique Beta testers, and that the Beta testers themselves have logged over 9 million hours of testing time.

“The game itself has a huge pre-existing fan base. We had about 2.4 million people register for the Star Wars fan site, over 2 million of which volunteered to do [beta] testing for free,” said Brown. “In terms of peak concurrent users, we had just over a quarter of a million people playing the game simultaneously.”

He also added that 725,000 unique players logged time over the Thanksgiving weekend, with each player averaging 12 hours of playtime.

Brown also took the time to comment about how advertising for the launch of TOR differs from other titles, aiming squarely at attracting new customers:

Brown told the conference that this high “preregistered and built-in” demand for the product would mean a launch advertising campaign considerably different from those for other high-profile EA titles, with the focus instead on attracting new customers for the long term (“two to four years”) and the critical percentage of players who renew their subscription from month to month.

For those that were on during the weekend, they can easily answer questions about the stability and playability of the game during that, but I know I personally ran into no issues in those regards. And of course, this comes as great news to EA, who has claimed it only needs 500,000 monthly subscribers to have TOR stay profitable.

Check out Gamespot for more.

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Posted by Lethality | 4 Comments

EA CFO Eric Brown On Quality And Post-Launch Plans

Gamasutra has a piece covering Wednesday’s Citi 2011 Tech Conference, where Electronic Arts CFO Eric Brown had some thoughts to share on The Old Republic.

On the topic of quality of service, Brown notes that they’ve been studying World of Warcraft’s first 12 months closely:

We’ve actually studied WoW pretty carefully. We spent a lot of time studying the first twelve months or so of WoW, and just to be clear here, when they initially launched, they did not launch in dual geographies. They went North America only.

He goes on to spell out the importance of the launch of the game and the early players’ experiences:

We really want to make sure that the first group of users into Star Wars has the best experience. For example, when they log on, they have instant access. Even when they’re playing in a densely-populated world, the bandwidth and response time is excellent. So quality of service is really important to us.

This is great news for many of us who have suffered through some terrible MMO launches. Of further interest to fans, Brown comments on their post-launch expansion plans for The Old Republic:

BioWare has built in a very extensive development plan to make sure there is enough content coming out in intervals,” said Brown. “We haven’t specified it, but industry norm is 18-24 months. And the idea there is to keep the game fresh and interesting for all of the players.

Of course, we all know how quickly players can consume content including Brown who said “a lot of people are going to burn through the content as quickly as possible, they’ll be left… waiting for the next expansion pack installment.”

Head on over to Gamasutra for the full read!

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Posted by Lethality | 2 Comments

Release Date Tied To Beta Test Results – Frank Gibeau

Computers And Video Games recently talked to Frank Gibeau, recently appointed boss of EA Labels, where he revealed that the release date of Star Wars: The Old Republic is “definitely tied” to the feedback coming out of the ongoing Game Testing program:

“We’re driving towards a date, but the very issue you raised is why we’re not announcing a date yet because you want to make sure that these services can last a decade”

Gibeau went on to talk about how important the launch of the game is:

“We don’t want to happen to us what happened to WoW and a couple of other services where in the first week there were queues trying to get on to the servers, the entire service crashed – we don’t want that to happen. So we need to nail and make sure that it’s up 24/7 and it’s high quality.”

We’ve heard BioWare say before that the release date will depend on the kind of feedback they’re getting from testers, and this seems to reaffirm that. So if you’re in Game Testing, work hard and give quality feedback to help get the game out that much quicker!

Head on over to CVG for the full read!

Source: ComputerAndVideoGames.com
Via: TORWars

 

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Posted by Lethality | 6 Comments

Analyst: Star Wars: The Old Republic First Year Sell-Through – 3 Million Units

Doug Creutz, analyst with Cowan FInancial Group today raised his investor rating for Electronic Arts, citing Star Wars: The Old Republic as a catalyst for his decision:

Since ‘Star Wars‘ became available for pre-orders three weeks ago, it has tracked very strongly on the Amazon.com top-selling video games list,” he writes in a research note. “We believe it is trending as well or better than two of the top-selling PC titles last year, Blizzard’s ‘Starcraft 2‘ and ‘World of Warcraft: Cataclysm‘, both of which went on to sell over 4 million units. We are raising our ‘Star Wars‘ first year sell-though estimate to 3 million units from 1.5 million units and our run-rate subscriber estimate to 2 million from 1 million.”

He goes on to list several other criteria to back up his raising of EA’s rating, including strong pre-orders for Battlefield 3.

While we as hard-core fans have no doubt the game will be a success on many levels, having TOR hit this kind of mainstream consumer success would be a win-win, both for EA/BioWare and fans alike. Let’s hope Mr. Creutz is on target!

Source: Forbes

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