Despite shedding 400,000 players since February, EA still happy with BioWare’s baby becoming the #2 MMO in the West.
Star Wars: The Old Republic has 1.3 million subscribers, according to numbers released during a recent EA earnings call.
1.3 million is still a huge popuation, even if it doesn't unseat WoW.
EA CEO, John Riccitello, revealed the number to investors while celebrating the fact that TOR is “now firmly established as the #2 MMO in the West” and that the publisher has “strong plans to grow it in fiscal ’13 [October thru September 2013].”
We suspect those “strong plans” refer to new content updates and perhaps even a new space component – at least that’s what we really want.
The most interesting part of the call was care of EA’s chief accounting officer Ken Barker who explained how The Old Republic’s player-base has changed over the past few months:
“Through the end of the quarter, approximately 2.4 million units have sold through. In our last call we indicated that we had 1.7 million active subscribers, and as of the end of April we now have 1.3 million, with a substantial portion of the decrease due to the casual and trial players cycling out of the subscriber base driving up the overall percentage of paying subscribers,” he explained.
Now obviously EA would never freely admit that Star Wars: The Old Republic has underperformed over the past few months, but it’s clear that these figures fall far short of World of Warcraft’s population numbers which were most recently quoted as 10 million at the end of 2011.
That said, Blizzard’s audience declined by over a million over the past year and it could easily be argued that the that sort of online dominance will never be seen again simply due to the number of MMO options which are now available to players; both via the subscription-only model and free-to-play.
Whatever the case, it’ll be very interesting to see how Star Wars: The Old Republic develops over the coming months.
Tags: Star Wars The Old Republic
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