14 DAY TRIAL // Doug Creutz, who is an analyst working at Cowen & Company and watches the video game industry, has estimated that more than 1.5 million gamers have been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, the new MMO from developer BioWare and publisher Activision, before the official launch date.
He links his number of pre-launch gamers to the number of servers that the publisher is at the moment dedicating to the video games, which grew from 106 to 140.
The analyst says that it would be easy for Star Wars: The Old Republic to reach more than 2 million subscribers by the end of March 31.
In a note to investor Doug Creutz stated, “Based on the number of servers now in operation, and the relatively high densities thereon, we feel fairly comfortable estimating that the game already has in excess of 1 million players, and potentially could have as many as 1.5 million, with the official launch date of the game yet to come.”
He added, “We note that EA gives players the first month free, so ‘players’ does not yet signify paying subscribers; however, our estimate does at least signify the number of people who have bought the game (and thus far, includes only a subset of those who pre-ordered the title).”
Star Wars: The Old Republic is the biggest MMO launch of the year and interest has been high enough to force Electronic Arts to apologize for the long queues that gamers have been seeing when trying to log in.
The publisher has stated that it only needs for the game to have half a million stable subscribers in order to make back the money it has invested into the development process.
Analysts have also suggested that the game will only use the subscription model for a little while and will then make the move to free-to-play, allowing most players to engage with The Old Republic without paying anything.