Last year EA announced that its upcoming MMORPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic, has been the most expensive game ever developed for the publisher.
“It is the largest R&D project EA has ever undertaken in terms of total dollars that we expect to spend bringing the title to market,” said chief financial officer Eric Brown at Janney Capital Markets’ 2010 Consumer Conference.
Then just last month, an analyst revealed that EA’s investors were betting against the game, citing previous underperforming MMOs that have failed to establish themselves from the shadow of World of Warcraft.
In a conference call yesterday, EA CFO Scott Brown said that, “At half a million subscribers, the game is substantially profitable, but it’s not the kind of thing we would write home about.”
“Anything north of a million subscribers, it’s a very profitable business.”
500,000 subscribers will not be easy to achieve, but it certainly won’t be impossible. While we can expect the game to surpass this figure at launch, whether or not it can maintain and grow a subscriber base depends on whether BioWare can deliver the goods.
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