{"id":9805,"date":"2011-02-02T14:56:00","date_gmt":"2011-02-02T12:56:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T22:00:00","slug":"the-old-republic-needs-500-000-subscribers-to-be-substantially-profitable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/pc\/9805-the-old-republic-needs-500-000-subscribers-to-be-substantially-profitable","title":{"rendered":"The Old Republic needs 500,000 subscribers to be \u2018substantially profitable\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last year EA announced that its upcoming MMORPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic, has been the most expensive game ever developed for the publisher.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It is the largest R&amp;D project EA has ever undertaken in terms of total dollars that we expect to spend bringing the title to market,&#8221; said chief financial officer Eric Brown at Janney Capital Markets&#8217; 2010 Consumer Conference.<\/p>\n<p>Then just last month, an analyst revealed that EA&rsquo;s investors were <a href=\"http:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/pc\/9627-investors-pessimistic-about-Star-Wars-The-Old-Republic.html\" target=\"_blank\">betting against <\/a>the game, citing previous underperforming MMOs that have failed to establish themselves from the shadow of World of Warcraft.<\/p>\n<p>In a conference call yesterday, EA CFO Scott Brown said that, &ldquo;At half a million subscribers, the game is substantially profitable, but it&#8217;s not the kind of thing we would write home about.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Anything north of a million subscribers, it&#8217;s a very profitable business.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>500,000 subscribers will not be easy to achieve, but it certainly won&rsquo;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Half a million subscribers will make Star Wars: The Old Republic profitable, a million to make it a &quot;very profitable business&quot;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9805\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}