14 DAY TRIAL // Publisher Electronic Arts has announced, about two weeks after the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, that the game has managed to get 1 million players and that they together had put in more than 60 million hours of real world time into the MMO.
Since then the company has also revealed in early February that the subscriber number has gone up to 1.7 million players.
This is a good sign given that the initial month of subscription they got with their copy of the MMO has now expired and the gamers had to pay in order to get the game for another month.
These numbers represent a successful launch for Star Wars: The Old Republic, when it comes to expectations from both analysts and Electronic Arts, and they prove beyond any doubt that at least two high profile MMOs that rely on subscriptions can co-exist at the same time in the marketplace.
World of Warcraft has been on a downward spiral for the last months and more and more MMOs have announced switches to the free-to-play mode.
But The Old Republic is the clear proof that you can maintain long term subscriber interest as long as a solid intellectual property is married to good gameplay mechanics and innovations like a focus on story and full voice acting.
What both Blizzard and BioWare seem to have understood is that there is one commodity that gamers find even more precious than their money: their playing time.
Getting to the end of one class in Star Wars: The Old Republic takes upwards of 50 hours and a dedicated gamer can manage that kind of playing time in the space of 30 days of subscription.
BioWare is betting that the player who experiences the game and one class will then be satisfied enough to pay for another month in order to experience another story and then another for the third, keeping the game going for at least six months from launch.
The model could be a solid one, as long as BioWare and Electronic Arts have a plan on what to do with the MMO after that time period expires and players begin to itch for something new.