Star Wars: The Old Republic beta logged 731,000 unique users last weekend

Ahead of its launch later this month, EA and BioWare flipped the Star Wars: The Old Republic’s ‘ON’ switches last weekend so prospective players could witness the fire-power of this armed and fully operational MMO.

According to traffic stats, 731,000 people did just that, with the servers also logging just over 250,000 concurrent users at peak.

“All in all it was a pretty successful test at scale for Star Wars,” said EA CFO Eric Brown speaking during the Baird’s 2011 Technology Conference earlier this week. “So we’re feeling good as we look to the 12/20 launch date.”

“People who have pre-ordered will get several days of early access to the servers. That’s part of the pre-order incentive program. It’s hard to calibrate initial demand for a product like this. There are really not that many relevant data points for an MMO of this scale,” he added.

“We’re in a position to scale the service as needed. Our concern has remained first and foremost our customer satisfaction, making sure that we can on-board people in an efficient manner. The queues are minimal. People who want to get on a given set of servers with their friends or people in their clan can do so and they’re not put in the attached portion of the other virtual world.”

The game has been in development since 2008, and at a rumoured budget of about $135 million, is one of the most expensive ever made.