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Blizz claims Swor will fail
spirus7
Member UncommonPosts: 142
Sorry for the typos the translation is from google (=
Star Wars The Old Republic will simply be profitable with just 500 000 subscribers
The "best-to-chew-only-to-talk" CEO of Activision Blizzard Bobby Kotick seems does not seem particularly concerned by the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Indeed, he did not hesitate to claim that the new BioWare MMO's and not even profitable for the EA and will cause great damage to its finances. Specifically, told Reuters Media Summit, Kotick focused on the rights to take Lucas to the use of names and other features from the world of Star Wars. It should however be noted that the EA CEO John Riccitiello noted that the Star Wars : The Old Republic will simply be profitable with only 500 thousand subscribers. If we make a guess based on what we saw in the beta of the title (where the servers were almost always full), maybe this number will not be long in coming.
Source: enternity.gr
Comments
yup read about it and its hilarious.
If a game like swtor isnt profitable.. i dont know what will.
They prolly have already made $100 Million just with preorders, with 1 Million subscribers, around $15 Million monthly.. a few months and the game should be on the profit zone and then its just caching in.
Blizz Ceo is probably worried that most of their costumers will be moving to EA.. as the stock market is pointing.
While Blizz shares are having losses, EA shares are rising up.
1. This has been posted already.
2. That guy is crazy.
3. That guy has almost nothing to do with running Blizzard or making decisions for them.
4. That guy is CEO, which means he's crazy.
5. You're misrepresenting what he said with this poor translation. He never said "SWTOR will fail" He said that it won't be very beneficial to EA/BIoware because too much of the profit will be given to Lucas in royalty fees. It's going to be profitable. what he's saying is that they will be giving too much profit to Lucas, which I disagree with. This game will be very successful and turn a good profit for EA.
Kotick, i'm sure, has dealth with Lucas very closely due to Activision's SW games, so I assume he knows what he's talking about with the whole liscensing thing, but I wouldn't trust anything else that the Activision CEO has to say about SWTOR.
CEO's are crazy by the way. Did I mention that? They are. They will say anything.
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While I am unsure if he speaks for Blizzard or if this is just a personal statement it seems rather risky to just assume that TOR will fail.
A rather stupid comment before he really knows, if TOR would become a success it would cost Blizz at least some players, maybe a lot.
Actually there is more to an MMORPG then making profit... it needs to be more then proffitable to keep creating more and new content at the speed desired by the community.
Espescially SWTOR with its story mode needs a lot of new fresh content to keep people interested over the long haul... many people that love the stories might not really love PvP or raiding and will play the game for the stories.
I think that the game needs atleast 1M if not 2M subs by the end of 2012 for EA to keep investing huge amounts of money in the game..
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
God you guys dont really read. Not everything revolves around the video games. The CEO din't say SWTOR will fail. He didnt say SWTOR will not take subs away. He was only talking to stockholders who are jumping the activision ship and climbing on board the EA express.
The CEO was just saying even if TOR gets a lot of subs, the profit margin is hindered due to LA taking so much of the profits. The CEO know from previous business with LA. So this statement was made to financial people, not you gamers out there.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/4576310
There has been an ongoing discussion on what Kotick said...
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
Explorer: 87%, Killer: 67%, Achiever: 27%, Socializer: 20%
@Dubyahite sorry for the re-post mate!First time i'm seeing this statement .'had to post it (=
Bioware is like Blizzard...they could poop in a bucket and put the bucket for sale and million people worldwide would flock in to buy it no matter the price.
That's because he didn't say SWTOR will fail. He just said it won't do them much good because liscensing with Lucas is too expensive.
The Star Wars IP is worth too much. Which doesn't make any sense, if that were the case then noone would ever make SW games, it would simply never be a profitable project.
I like this quote from kotick:
"We've been in business with Lucas for a long time and the economics will always accrue to the benefit of Lucas, so I don't really understand how the economics work for Electronic Arts."
If you don't understand how the economics work for EA, then why the hell have you "been in business with Lucas for a long time." That's some pretty bad double speak. OBVIOUSLY Activision made money of the Star Wars IP. You can't say that it will work for you but not for someone else.
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Never listen to anything Blobby Butlick has to say as he obviously sprinkles his cornflakes with PCP. This is the guy who wanted to charge monthly fees for CoD MP.
2 companies, 1 bucket!
Yeah but you gotta throw Lucas in there now. And Lucas gets it's own bucket every time.
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you have to read deeper into what the guy is trying to say. even sony seemed to lament the high liscencing fee LA put on the star wars IP. Instead of a tiered fee where as the game aged the fee reduce I had heard LA actually increased it twice over the course of SWG's lifetime. Granted that may have been LA's way of killing SWg to begin with but in the end that will take a chunk of profite out of the old republic. The high cost of voice over production for expansions and content will also be a mitigating factor. but yes the game will be profitable, it has garnered a big following and is getting a small attrition from swg and wow. The thing peole need to also be aware of is this is being used as a testbed for a ME mmo in the same way as EVE was being used as a test bed for WOD. All the trials and tribulations bioware experiences with this their first mmo will go on to other projects. I actually see bioware handing the game itself off completely to EA in roughly 3 years..a time when the cost of production would hinder biowares development of other projects. No for anyone who's experiences how EA handles their properties they like to milk their clients for money with expansions...don't get me wrong well crafted expansions but nonetheless. My biggest worry is this turns into the horrible decisions clone wars online has taken with immersion breaking vanity items. yes i know entirely different game and dev but when i see a clone trooper with butterfly wings i realize LA no longer respect their own IP they are trying to milk it for every credit they can. At least for the most part trek hasn't done that in terms of gaming...i dunno I'll be playing the game at launch and seeing as I had alot of fun with beta and I know alot of friends who will play i'll stick witht he game until something immersion breaking occurrs. I havent been involved in a mmo since there.com closed...while not a game and more a virtual world it was one of the few places that kept me exploring and having fun.
so say we all
This! That's the one thing I forgot to mention. This whole conversation is about stockholders. Their stock was just downgraded by analysts while EA's stock is on the rise. He is trying to reassure shaky investors. That is all this is about. This has nothing to do with the actual games themselves, or even really the loss of subscribers. What he's basically saying is this, "If you invest in EA because of this game, just remember that the biggest "investor" is Lucas, and they are gonna get their cut before you get anything." He's comparing that to Blizzard's offerings which don't share the same 3rd party liscensing agreements.
This comment wasn't directed at the gaming community, EA, Bioware, you, me, or anyone except investors. It's part of his job. This is why I say a CEO will say anything. This really is their responsibility. If the stock does bad, the CEO is generally held responsible.
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First of all the article is not saying swtor will fail, but the question of EA substaining profit. Lucas is going to receive their lump of profit. He's just questioning how EA plays into this.
"Analysts don't seem to agree with Kotick, of course, with a recent survey conducted by Lazard Capital Markets finding that over 50 percent of 381 respondents have grown tired of Blizzard's game."
Why did Kotick even give an opinion in the first place?
Bottomline he knows that WOW is long in the tooth and without a bonafide title to keep the playerbase from exiting, Activision needs to have a plan. Sure Diablo 3 is in the pipeline and so is Titan.
WOW will be here for a very long time, but when the experts state the game declined by 800k subs in the last year and they expect anywhere from 900k to 1.6 million to leave to join SWTOR, things get a tad dicey in the corporate board room.
Kotick is not Smedley but he might be having his moments.
Watch out WOW Players, here comes your NGE.......:P
He gave his opinion to investors stating even If EA pulls subs from them, even if EA has a successful launch, even if SWTOR is the next big thing, EA's profits will not be remotely close to what activision is pulling infrom WoW due to the high cost of licensing Star Wars from LA. And this CEO's opinion is valid as not only an industry insider, but also a former business partner with LA.
I bet you million dollars nobody outside of the MMO fan base seen anything remotely wrong with what he is trying to say.
Wasn't there something similar said about Rift, but wasn't that by the CEO of Trion?
It seems to me that CEOs and gaming heads need to keep a tighter rein on their mouths when it comes to talking about other games on the market.
It's all well and good trying to boost your own sales, but turning around and quite stubbornly stating that SWTOR will fail is quite, quite silly. It could backfire at least...and in huge ways.
We'll see.
.
Yes but EA games is NOT like Blizzard everything they touch becomes poop.
Any stockholder dropping Blizz with D3 and the SC2 xpac on the horizon is bananas. Seems like a big risk to me, not saying SWOTR will fail, but I'm interested in the mid-late 2012 report after people have had a chance to get out of "it's beta so we're nice to each other mode" and into "lol no noob, you put the wrong stats on your lightsabre, go find a scrub raid to join". No amount of voice overs will alleviate people's online behavior.
They will just blame it on WoW, because those players came from WoW and ruined their game.
You guys forget, investors (the point of this discussion) do not give one crap about the community in either game. They care about the dollar signs. WoW, Blizzard, Diablo 3, Starcraft, Call of Duty, Hello Kitty Online, GW 2, AoC, WAR, mean nothing to them in this case.
All they are concerned with is how much money this game can make.
The answer, if you were wondering, is lots.
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What exactly does a CEO do? sits around and signs his name to documents and contracts while the real talent of the company laugh at him behind his back.
They probably don't even play the games they invest in.
Probably true for the most part. They're too busy being successful.
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