14 DAY TRIAL // Star Wars: The Old Republic, the MMO developed by BioWare and published by Electronic Arts, has managed to get 1.7 million subscribers towards the end of February, and at least one analyst believes that the game will continue a steady growth and will reach 2 million paying players during June of this year.
Dog Creutz, who is an analyst working with Cowen and Company, believes that most of the players will be continuing subscribers, which means that they are continuing to give money to the two companies beyond the one month which they receive when they pick the packaged game.
Creutz also believes that the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic in the Asia and Pacific region later during March will also boost subscription numbers.
Before launch analysts were skeptical of whether the new MMO could create a stable, long-term paying player base or whether BioWare would need to quickly switch to the free-to-play model in order to keep the game alive.
The development team has also revealed that at the moment Star Wars: The Old Republic is being sustained by a team which consists of 30 producers, 40 platform engineers, 80 programmers, 140 arts, 75 designers and a team of 280 people who are working in quality assurance.
Rich Vogel, who is the executive producer working on the game, stated during the Game Developers Conference that managing such a huge group of developers was a challenge, saying, “We brought everyone to us to explain where they were. In the background we had a board that was twenty feet across and had magnetic strips of different things that outlined what we needed to do and were tracked daily.”
At the moment the entire team is working on the new major patch for the game, labeled 1.2, which will be launched during April and will come with more content and a number of fixes.