Game News Dragon Age 3 delayed in favor of SW:TOR?

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Tags: BioWare; Dragon Age: Inquisition; Star Wars: The Old republic

Dragon Age III has supposedly been delayed to 2014, according to Gameindustry.biz.

Following yesterday's earnings report from EA, which revealed that BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic was down to 1.3 million active subscribers, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter has noted that the MMO has had another effect besides giving some investors pause; Pachter believes the Star Wars title has ultimately caused a delay in the development of the next Dragon Age.

"Dragon Age III appears to have slipped to FY:14. We had previously expected the next Dragon Age to be released in Q4:13, two years after its predecessor. However, we believe that a significant portion of the BioWare team responsible for the game was reassigned to Star Wars in order to create content and fix bugs to keep the game's audience engaged," Pachter commented.

Think of the positive side of things. This time they can say it took them 3 years to make the game instead of churning it out in a year.

 

[Mozgoëbstvo]

Think of the positive side of things. This time they can say it took them 3 years to make the game instead of churning it out in a year.

It can't be marketed as a positive feature when it will have the same exact depth and length as the others.

 

[hoverdog]

Shit or turd - which is better and why???? DISCUSS!!

 

[GreyViper]

And in the end no one cared.

 

[Shannow]

Dragon Age III has supposedly been delayed to 2014, according to Gameindustry.biz.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo






Oh wait, this is Daathri not Wastelan 2. Ok, move along. Nobody cares.

 

[mindx2]

BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic was down to 1.3 million active subscribers, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter has noted that the MMO has had another effect besides giving some investors pause

How many did it have to begin with? It would please me to see another MMO slowly die... when will these things stay dead? Yeah, I know... wishful thinking...

 

[sgc_meltdown]

leaky battleship plans delayed in favor of fixing torpedoed engineless aircraft carrier

 

[Azrael the cat]

Down to 1.3 million. This is why it's nigh impossible for a company with an established fanbase to hurt themselves financially through a mmorpg. Even a commercial disappointment like this one makes bucketloads of cash.

Say that the damn mmorpg goes into a sudden deathspiral from here and loses all of its subscribers and shuts down by next month. If they're DOWN to 1.3 milllion, they probably had considerably more at some point, and most likely a fuckload for the first lot of client sales (for the instore 'buy a client and 3 month subscription' thing they always do with these games) and early subs. Sure you can do the 'demo sub, play through a character, unsubscribe before paying' thing, but as far as I was aware, most of those early sales still come from box sales (again, packaging it with a subscription fee so you can get store shelfspace AND give the client away free online at the same time).

I remember Blizzard saying that they had covered all costs and made a good profit from WoW from box sales alone - i.e. that even if everyone had cancelled their subscriptions one month later it would still have been a profit-making venture. Bioware wouldn't have sales that big, and would have dropped off rapidly as mmorpg fans found it to be a lesser version of WoW and Biodrones realised that it was just another mmorpg instead of the mmorpg 3.0 radical redesign it was hyped as. And their costs were bigger than usual (though they would have been in low-scale development for most of that massive development time - hence why their suits still didn't know that they had nothing but a WoW clone as little as 2 years before release: that wasn't just hype, it must have been a genuine internal company and investory belief as evidenced by both Bioware and the financial press blaming TOR for the dip in EA's share price). But that share price dip wasn't part of any operating loss - it was just a downgrading of the amount of profit they were expecting. They still probably made their money back in the first month and have been enjoying the gravy from the subscriptions since then.

If anything, they'd probably be reasonably happy if TOR ended soon. The Biodrones have at least one more game in them before they give up on Bioware (yes, even the ones raging about how bad TOR is), the mmorpg fans are just fucking desperate for something new to do and a new flavour of large-budget WoW clone is the closest they're getting to going out for a walk, and the gaming press is at least 3 flops away from calling Bioware on their bullshit. Ending TOR would just make it easier for them to put out a ME or DA mmorpg without worrying about cannibalising their own market - and they could do it in the knowledge that even if 'Mass Effect Online' flops they'll still make fuckloads from the first couple of months of subs.

Fuck I hate mmorpgs.