Concerns Over The Old Republic Profitability Hit EA Share Price

A market analyst has sparked a run on the shares of video game publisher Electronic Arts after he expressed a number of concerns linked to the future prospects of the recently launched MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Analyst Todd Mitchell, who is working for Brean Murray Carret & Co has told investors that he had “creeping concerns” when it comes to the profitability of The Old Republic and added, “Specifically, initial sales appear to be below expectations, and casual observation of early play is causing us to rethink our churn assumptions.”

The projected share price for EA stock as seen by Mitchell has gone down from 28 to 22 dollars (21.5 to 16.9 Euro) and if other sources take the same view of The Old Republic then the price of actual shares might go down even more in the coming days.

Both video game developer BioWare and publisher Electronic Arts have expressed only positive feelings when it came to the launch of the Star Wars MMO, saying that the game has managed to get more than 1 million players very quickly and that in two weeks they have managed to rack up more than 60 million hours of play time.

BioWare has recently launched the first significant patch for the game and the company has revealed long term plans for the MMO, including more content updates, fixes designed to fix any sort of bugs and major revamps to the game mechanics that will encourage players to create alternate characters.

One analyst has recently speculated that the development process for Star Wars: The Old Republic, including marketing has cost more than half a billion dollars, but Electronic Arts has also said that it only needs to have half a million long term subscribers in order to make the game a success from a financial standpoint.