Speaking at the Reuters’ Media Summit, Activision Blizzard’s CEO has questioned the “economics” behind Electronics Arts’ big foray into the MMO world with Star Wars: The Old Republic.
“Lucas is going to be the principal beneficiary of the success of Star Wars,” he declared. “We’ve been in business with Lucas for a long time and the economics will always accrue to the benefit of Lucas, so I don’t really understand how the economics work for Electronic Arts.
“If you look at the history of the people investing in an MMO and achieving success, it’s a small number.”
Seeing as Activision has worked closely with Lucas Arts in the past, most notably with the disappointing Force Unleashed series, Mr Kotick does have an insight into how George Lucas’ game publishing arm works.
However licensing agreements vary massively between a regular £39.99 game and a subscription-based MMO, so we suspect Kotick’s comments don’t reveal the real picture.
In addition the MMO genre is still one of the fastest growing areas of games development and to make the assertion that only a few publishers out there are making money is really misleading.
GamersFirst, gPotato, NCsoft, Turbine Interactive, Funcom, CCP Games and Perfect World are seven publishers we can think of off the top of our heads which have declared their success over the past twelve months and we’re sure there are more out there.
It’s much more likely that Kotick’s comments are in response to the widespread belief among investors that The Old Republic will steal a considerable chunk of World of Warcraft’s subscriber-base, with a recent survey confirming that over 1.6 million gamers could abandon Azeroth for BioWare’s first MMO.
Star Wars: The Old Republic will be released worldwide on 20th December.
Tags: Star Wars The Old Republic
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