So for my news article I went to a site that I frequent for gaming news and that is Kotaku.com. They have news stories and blog posts about games and visitors can comment on the stories of the day. The article I found for my game, Star Wars The Old Republic, focuses on the drop off of subscribers. Electronic Arts, the publisher of the Star Wars MMO, had roughly 1.7 million subscribers in its quarter 3 financial earnings statement. As of quarter 4, that number has dropped 25% to 1.3 Million subscribers. It goes to say in the article that EA attributes the loss in subscriptions to players who had trial memberships and just casually trying the game out leaving.
With that said, As I roam through the game world on my server "'''Assassins of Sion", I can't help but feel like that number could be less even now. My server when I last logged in had only 102 people playing on the entire server. Guild members that I have talked to said that at one point, there were thousands of players on the server at any one time. This leads me to believe that there are even less active players playing. A quick look through the massive server list and you see light server load across most of the servers with only 2 having a high server load. The guild and I have talked about these issues and believe that very soon we will see servers merge together to keep the game populated. At this moment, we have 102 people in my guild, and of those members I have seen 6 to 10 people on. This makes me wonder how much longer can this game survive with so little server population, let alone trying to do a paper on a game culture that seems to be evaporating right before my eyes as I play.
This is why the news article that I talk about above, struck me as important to talk about this week. After many discussions with community members about the way they feel Bioware has been not hearing their desperate cries for changes and updates to the game, I can only guess that if this continues, we will not see this game lost for as long as World of Warcraft has.
The people are the life force of your game and if you neglect them, pretty soon, you will be left with no subscribers and therefore no game at all.
Star Wars loses 400,000 Members
Miles Swanson
Bioware sounds like they are going to lose out on a lot of community members if they don't make some changes quick! 400,000 members is a huge amount of members to lose! You mentioned that the loss was thought to be due to trial members giving the game a try and then leaving. Perhaps Bioware needs to think about a way to get those trial members to stick around even after the trial membership is up. Maybe offering them a first time discount for signing up a new membership! Also, updating the game seems pretty important too. Especially, if it is what your members are asking for. Seems like bad business and poor customer service to me!
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ReplyDeleteAs new games come out the older the game is the less interesting people seem to be with it. World of Warcraft has lost many people as well because of the resent launch of Diablo 3. As I've noticed with World of Warcraft if you leave and come back to the game you can get free game time and some pretty cool items. If you leave Star Wars do they give any kind of incentives to come back. Do you think if they released some kind of new content people would come back to the game? I never find this fun when people leave ones game and you lose your friends but I hope that each game that people leave from they some how get their players to come back because 400,000 people lost from your game alone is a big adjustment.
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