Star Wars: The Old Republic, the new MMO from developer BioWare and publisher Electronic Arts, might only have been launched for less than one month but investors are already looking at it as a sign that the subscription based MMO market has life left in it.
Colin Sebastian, an analyst who watches the video game market for Bard Equity Research, has written to investors that, “We view the early success of Star Wars as an indication of a healthy MMO market.”
He added, “While there is likely some shifting of usage from World of Warcraft, we see a viable market for multiple million-user MMOs in the US and Europe. With more than 1 million registered online users, we see roughly one-third (or roughly 350K) representing peak concurrent usage.”
Electronic Arts has stated before New Year’s Eve that more than 1 million players had signed up for the game since launch and that they have put in more than 60 million hours of play time.
EA has maintained that it will seek to get as many subscribers as possible for the paid version of
Star Wars: The Old Republic and that it has no plans to deliver a free-to-play version of the experience during 2012.
The company says that it only needs about half a million subscribers to break even and recuperate its development costs, which some sources have estimated to be close to 100 million dollars (77.4 million Euro).
Recently a number of high profile MMOs, some of them launched recently, like DC Universe Online from Sony, have moved to the free-to-play model in order to get a bigger player base while using revenue from microtransactions in order to sustain the cost of running the games.
There’s also speculation that with the launch of the Mists of Pandaria expansion World of Warcraft might also get a free-to-play version.
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