Did Swtor fail?  Did it kill WoW?

EA just announced that SWTOR has 1.7 Million Subscribers.  The LA times also publciized that the game cost nearly $200M to make.

LA Times Link      1.7 Subscribers Link

With this information one can make a couple of broad estimations to see how SWTOR  performed.

Estimated Cost of Swtor  $ 200,000,000
Active Subscribers         1,700,000
Retail Box Cost  $                  60
Retail Sales  $ 102,000,000
Release Date Loss  $  (98,000,000)

 

On day 1 Swtor had a loss of $98M dollars.  Although this might look really bad, the real money comes from the monthly subscription fee…

Active Subscribers         1,700,000
Monthly Subscription Fee  $                  15
Monthly Revenue  $   25,483,000

SWTOR received a monthly revenue stream of $25.5 M based on the 1.7M subscribers each paying the $15 monthly fee.

If we extrapolate this further…(assuming the 1.7M subscribers stays fixed)

Month 1  $   25,483,000
Month 2  $   25,483,000
Month 3  $   25,483,000
Month 4  $   25,483,000
After 4 months of operation  $ 101,932,000
Release Date Loss  $  (98,000,000)
Profit  $     3,932,000

…you can see that after 4 months of operations, SWTOR breaks-even and will begin to become profitable.

I excluded overhead costs, operational expenses, dev royalties, IP royalties, subscriber churn and a lot of other costs but in terms of just revenue I feel like this is a pretty good estimate.

So back to our main questions:

Did Swtor fail?

SWTOR most certainly did not fail.  It might not have been a huge success but it is still a great MMO release that will make the company money in a few months.

http://www.torhead.com/guide/leaks  shows a lot of future content patches to be released in the coming months, so I think Swtor will be a very successful mmo.

 

Did it kill WoW?

SWTOR did not kill WoW.   WoW still maintains very high subscriber counts and is still the king of the MMO genre.