TOR is not going to fail - Bioware won't allow it. - Well some of that article may be true or "close" to truth. After all it takes as many hours to produce Voice Overs for so many thousands of lines of text. And there are examples of the games with huge budgets that eventually failed because companies valued their investments more than the team working on the actual game. The good example of such a failure was "Tabula Rasa" and "Auto Assault". Company spent so much money (based on that time terms) for developing the game and so much time that eventually they decided to pull the plug because a lot of people who actually worked on the game were laid off.

TOR may not inherit the same fate, but its all up to us players really. We will need to show the devs and especially EA that we love the game by playing it and spending money on our subscriptions. If for some reason subs won't reach a specific number and judging by the amount of money spent on development it has to be millions of subs to allow EA make that money back that they have invested into creating this game. If this number is not reached EA won't invest any more money into game's future development.

This little bickering inside the game development process is expected especially when such a huge project is being developed. And the situation on market and overal financial situation in the country definitely affected the game's process. And that is one of the reasons why game was delayed in the first place. They simply couldn't make it on time because of the lay offs that were supposed to happen in Bioware.

BUT, they can still pull it off. Have the quests chains finished for all 8 classes and have all the other most important parts of the game finished, companions, world quests and flashpints. We as hyped up Star Wars fans will definitely eat this bone. Hopefully by the end of 2011 Bioware and EA will have their money back that was invested into the game development and they can start working on the future developments of the TOR.

Hopefully TOR will have 2-3 million subs. Game copy sales should bring about 150mil if there will be enough collectors editions which a lot of people will buy and regular game copy sales should yield the rest of necessary money. of course they will need to spend a few millions for a good advertising campaign. But TOR really needs it. Game of such a huge IP needs a good marketing campaign. Otherwise it may really affect the reputation.

So I'd say game sales should bring about 150mil, then if game has 2-3 mil subs - thats gonna be around 40-50 mil a month of income from subs, of course there will be expenses for traffic, engineers for servers etc, but if people keep playing the game for at least 3-4 months it should be a good assurance for EA and Bioware that game is worth future investments and things should become better.

I mean after all 300 million dollars were spent on SOMETHING right? And that something must be already developed. So I'd say that Bioware needs to somehow prove to EA that they can pull it off. I mean look how excited players are over this game. Its still 6 months from release and there are literally hundreds of thousand of posts on the swtor forums. I've never seen such a popularity over the game that hasnt even been released.

If EA cares little about the future of TOR - then that money may as well be wasted and game will ventually die (it will still take at least couple of years for that to happen).

But I wanted to say this:

EA and Bioware - you may damn count on this that WE WILL BE PLAYING NO MATTER WHAT YOU THINK OR DO. And either game lives or dies is really up to you guys. KEEP THE COURSE Bioware, under any circumstances - KEEP THE COURSE. Don't convert the game into a cookie cutter, if Star Wars the Old Republic will lose its specific atmosphere and direction - You are done. If it becomes similar to any other MMO out there - it will most likely lose a lot of excited potential subscribers eventually.

You know what we like in TOR. You know why we liked KOTOR. KEEP THAT COURSE and you will be ok.
[Swtor.com Community]

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