Analyst: Electronic Arts Has Spent Half a Billion Dollars on The Old Republic

An analyst has estimated that the total expenditure for the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic from publisher Electronic Arts is over 500 million dollars (about 391.1 million Euro), which takes into account both the development and the marketing costs for the project.

The estimate comes from Doug Creutz, who is an analyst watching the video game industry for the research firm Cowen & Company.

He has stated that Electronic Arts has tried to minimize “its risks as much as it can but it’s still a risky bet” and he believes that the pay-off for the investment depends heavily on “how Star Wars performs.”

The half a billion dollars investment estimate is much larger than the 80 million dollars (62.5 million Euro) that Michael Pachter, another video game industry analyst, thought that the development process for Star Wars: The Old Republic cost.

Publisher Electronic Arts has refused to comment on the monetary figures and has said that it believes that the investment in the MMO is justified and it will be quickly recuperated.

An executive has stated that The Old Republic needs about half a million players to subscribe for the long term in order to begin making a profit from the MMO.

The game launched on December 20 all over the world and after just one week Electronic Arts announced that 1 million people had signed up and that they had put in more than 60 million hours of playtime.

Star Wars: The Old Republic has also received a number of small updates and this week it will get the first big content pack, Rise of the Raskghouls, and BioWare says that it has long term plans for new content delivery.

Some gamers have been disappointed with the way the developers have handled issues linked to the overall performance of the game.