SWTOR – Two Years After EA Louse

You remember EA Louse, right?

He was the guy who wrote the tell-all post about the failure of Warhammer Online?  If not, well, you missed it.  At least in its original habitat.  The blog was shut down for violating terms of service, though you can read the original post here. (Or here at the Web Archive, with all the comments still there.)

More is the pity, since it had something approaching the most especially self destructive comment sections… nearly 1,500 comments long… that I have ever seen.  It even had some great throw backs to past events.

The main focus of the post was why Warhammer Online failed and it included the usual aspects you find in most of these stories; unrealistic goals, out of touch and lying management, a dramatically over optimistic public spokesperson, and bad marketing.  The only likely suspect to be exonerated was Mark Jacobs, who was described as being too heads down trying to fix things, though that sounds like a leadership sin as well.

None of that was very controversial by the time EA Louse posted it.  Warhammer Online was a year old and had come and gone as far as the mainstream MMO market was concerned.  If that had been the sole focus of the post, it would not have seen so many comments.

But EA Louse took some time out from his Warhammer Online reminiscences to go after BioWare and Star Wars: The Old Republic, a product which had at that point been in the public eye for more than two years, and was still about a year from being launched.

Rehashing the past is easy, predicting the future though….

Anyway, thanks to the magic of the internet, I still have his original post. (And all of the comments. RSS feed local save for the win!)  And this is what EA Louse had to say about SWTOR:

And Bioware? Don’t make me laugh. They’ve spent more money making the Old Republic than James Cameron spent on Avatar. Shit you not. More than $300 million! Can you believe that?

And you know what they’re most proud of? This is the kicker. They are most proud of the sound. No seriously. Something like a 20Gig installation, and most of it is voiceover work. That’s the best they have. The rest of the game is a joke. EA knows it and so does George Lucas, they’re panicking, and so most of Mythic has already been cannibalized to work in Austin on it because they can’t keep pushing back launch.

Old Republic will be one of the greatest failures in the history of MMOs from EA. Probably at the level of the Sims Online. We all know it too…

This, of course, drove the BioWare/SWTOR fanboys absolutely insane.  This was the fire that fed the comments section, as a lot of people were (and remain) very emotionally invested in SWTOR.  They called bullshit, grabbed torches and pitchforks, and created an epic comment thread of bile and hate.

That is all history.  But here we are, about 10 months after SWTOR launched.

Yes, it did not make the clearly hubristic numbers initially set out as subscription number goals, and the subscription numbers they did get started dropping after the first quarter.  Then after only a few months and some layoffs, EA was claiming that SWTOR was not an important title to their lineup as people seemed to think.  Which, along with the whole conversion to free to play, starts to sound like things have, at a minimum, have not gone as planned.  And then key players at BioWare started jumping ship.

But it isn’t dead yet.  And they are talking about regular updates.

Still, that is a lot of money spent.  And you can just bet that LucasArts gets their cut every month, which no doubt is part of the overhead that made the 500K subscriber mark the line in the sand for profitability. (Then again, SWG remained viable while never hitting the 500K mark, and SOE was always adding to the game.  So does SWTOR face more overhead or simply more greed?)

So here we are, two years after that post.  Has EA Louse and his view of SWTOR been vindicated by history?