SWTOR: By the numbers

In our last look at the Star Wars The Old Republic, we theorized about how much things could have cost considering the sheer amount of work that must have gone into the audio. We’re talking hundreds of top quality voice actors recording hour upon hour of entertainment, thousands of hours mixing, recording and placing into the game.This is before we’ve even got onto actually creating any of the basic coding for the game....

It's all a lot of work

....creating the network components, creating local components, designing every single character you come across, rights wrangling with Lucas and friends, advertising, story writing, PR, release schedules, accounts management and much, much more.

Realistic figures revealed: $200 million

Since then, we’ve got a slightly more solid source on how much it cost to create the Old Republic. The LA Times reported that it cost nearly $200 million to create. 200 million dollars is such a large amount of money that it makes it absolutely impossible to truly appreciate how much money it is. If you earned a dollar every second for, say, the next year, you would only have a touch over 31 million dollars; you would need to continue earning a dollar every second for about six and a half years before you could brag having $200 million, and that’s if you didn’t spend any of the money you had coming in.

It's all about the price tag

This perhaps explains the £44.99 price tag on the game from the official website, a fairly standard price for an AAA title on consoles but something of a rarity on PC – especially considering you must continue paying to play (an additional £18.99 for 60 days). Compared to say, James Cameron’s CGI-based epic Avatar – which cost over $280 million to make – things aren’t all that bad, the entry to a movie is at least a quarter of entry to the Old Republic, meaning that it would take some 12 million people to see Avatar before they got their money back (not counting DVD and rental). In comparison, it’d take only four and a half million purchases before the money was gotten back on the Old Republic.

EA's game and EA's rules

Although that’s oversimplifying it somewhat – presuming that everything in that price goes to the creator. In reality, the developer (and the publisher, who likely fronted the majority of the money) gets only a tiny slice of that pie, especially when the game doesn’t come directly from the supplier itself. This is probably why EA are so keen to push their Origin service, cutting out companies like Steam in order to keep that particular slice of pie to themselves. Instead, the developers will get the majority of their money from the subscription fee.

Bioware needs a million subscribers

For a single user it would take some eight million subscriptions (that’s 333333 years of game time) of two months to cover the cost of the game. Thankfully, Bioware have a few more subscribers than that and so, on top of their 60 dollar entry fee, it probably won’t take too much to recoup the money that went into the game. It would take a million subscribers a mere eight months to amass that much playtime and some of them might be paying for higher subscription packages. That’s still a long time to be out of pocket, but factor in that original sixty bucks and you have a game that is far more likely to be successful than the average, non-Star Wars, non-Bioware title.

Let’s put this into context of games – although I’d just like to put here (because it didn’t fit anywhere else) that both the Old Republic and the film Titanic cost more to make than the actual boat – and take a look at some comparisons. Black Ops is estimated to have cost anywhere from around $15-$28 million dollars, depending on who you ask. It also made a billion dollars, so for anybody who questions yearly instalments, there’s your answer. Final Fantasy VII, undisputed king of the PS1 era, cost $40 million dollars and I can’t even begin to imagine how much that game made on the used market over the years until it was released on the PlayStation store (where it outsells almost all other PS1 games month in, month out).

Not much of a risk involved...

These are exceptional games though, and you must look at things on an individual basis. Star Wars: The Old Republic has a couple of things going for it: firstly it’s built upon what is possibly the most popular sci-fi film series of all time. It’s also being made by Bioware, who have not only proven themselves within the RPG genre time and time again, but have proven themselves within the Star Wars universe as well. In my knowledge there’s never been a less risky combination and that explains how EA came to the decision that it was worth putting millions of dollars into development. Whether Bioware knew how far they could push, I’m not sure, but they knew this was a big deal and obviously pitched accordingly.

$200 million is not that much!

In reality, that $200 million isn’t a huge amount - I wouldn’t mind being a penny behind it – when you consider how many people have an inbuilt interest in this game. There are people, non-gamers, who will upgrade their computer, discover how to download drivers and make their first online credit card payment just to be involved in this game. Similarly, there are people who will play this game just because it’s another Star Wars Bioware title. Even if they buy the game through the website and only buy a couple of months’ worth of time, they’ve put money back into the development cycle and, when the game grows and improves (thanks to some of that money from subscriptions), some of those people might come back.

Over the last week or so, perhaps in light of discovering just how much The Old Republic cost to make, there have been a lot of people saying that the game is going bust, that it must be a failure. In all likelihood the game is probably doing as well, if not better than the accountants at Bioware supposed for. Afterall, they know exactly how much money they are making, how much they put into the project, how much LucasArts takes and what they make from each subscriber.

General reviews are good and those that love the voice work claim that they won’t be able to go back to other MMOs like WoW.

There's light at the end of the tunnel

So, in short, I’d guess that it’s not quite yet the disaster that people think it is. They might have dismissed it thanks to it not appeasing the “hardcore” crowd, who claim they’ve reached parts of the game that just don’t work, but things are looking pretty bright. Would EA ever have put that much money in if there was any chance they wouldn’t get it back?

Mat Growcott
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