Posted by Momus in BioWare, Electronic Arts, News | 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.
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Impressive numbers, probably see about 1.5 million subs at the get go. Could very well hit 3 million in a year.
Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but that’s only 4.5 hours average online time per beta tester. I mean, it’s nice that they had so many testers, but it’s a Star Wars MMO so large numbers of testers is to be expected.
I really enjoyed my time testing, so I’m surprised that the average time spent testing was only 4.5 hours. Wonder what’s up with those numbers.
You can’t calculate the average that way, you have to separate the two entities, weekend vs general. Weekend testers averaged 12 hours each. He’s talking only about the thanksgiving weekend, not the entirety of beta testing.
If you believe that over 725,000 unique testers averaged over 12 hours each over the weekend,that’s 8.7 million hours. In one weekend.