Star Wars: The Old Republic Australian servers to be Shut Down

Post by tHeBoRg @ 03:56pm 26/03/13 | 23 Comments

Bioware will be closing the Australia/Pacific servers shortly after the expansion Rise of the Hutt Cartel due to low population issues. An official statement was made on the game's forums by Community Manager Eric Musco.

Getting to the point of being able to merge the servers is going to be a multistep process. First off we need to update our Free Character Transfer System to include the game changes that we have made recently along with the upcoming changes in Game Update 2.0 and the Digital Expansion: Rise of the Hutt Cartel. We will then offer Free Character Transfers to anyone currently playing on an APAC server to a North American server of the same gameplay type, specifically:
Mastar Dar’Nala (PvP) will transfer to The Bastion (PvP)
Gav Daragon (RP-PvE) will transfer to Begeren Colony (RP-PvE)
Dalborra (PvE) will transfer to The Harbinger (PvE)
We will also need to update our server merge technology at which point we will ultimately merge each of the APAC servers into the corresponding North American servers as indicated above. We are moving as quickly as we can to make this happen, but we want to make sure this is a smooth transition, so it will take some time.

The Rise of the Hutt Cartel content expansion is due to arrive on April 14th 2013.

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Darkhawk
Posted 07:51pm 27/3/13

And I was about to get a 60-day pass. Hello lag, goodbye me!

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Nerf Lord
Posted 08:09pm 27/3/13

I tried the american server (hooray f2p), it was actually playable best I could tell, but I don't see it helping population since they're on a different schedule over there.

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fryzeegunner
Posted 09:07am 28/3/13

yeh this has gone down the s******

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Hogfather
Posted 09:47am 28/3/13

Heh this game is dying faster than the SOE one.

Surely someone can make a good Star Wars MMO with legs? There is so much material to draw on and a cult nerdgasm following.

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eski
Posted 10:28am 28/3/13

Surely someone can make a good Star Wars MMO with legs?

Not on this scale, not now. The cost of producing an MMO like this is in the hundreds of millions.

Activision already have WoW, EA just got super burned on this and I bet none of the other big publishers are currently willing to take that sort of risk. The last great hope for MMOs is that the Elder Scrolls Online somehow manages to do well, but based on recent trends it doesn't seem likely.

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Hogfather
Posted 10:38am 28/3/13

Disagree. There's lots of activity in the MMO space and 'this scale' is a moving target as technology evolves. Won't be too long before fully-fledged MMOs can be authored by indies with a decent engine IMO.

Also, I think EA at least broke even on SWTOR? They sold a s***load of boxes + a few months subs.

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Eorl
Posted 11:07am 28/3/13

Not on this scale, not now. The cost of producing an MMO like this is in the hundreds of millions.Activision already have WoW, EA just got super burned on this and I bet none of the other big publishers are currently willing to take that sort of risk. The last great hope for MMOs is that the Elder Scrolls Online somehow manages to do well, but based on recent trends it doesn't seem likely.

I agree that MMO's are quite expensive to make these days, at least for the big name IPs, but companies like NCSoft and Perfect World will continue to pump out the smaller, free-to-play titles like Neverwinter and WildStar with ease. Obviously these games will only be filled by a niche (WildStar might gain more popularity) but they are still somewhat profitable.

Also here is a leaked PAX East demo of ESO, looking quite nice.

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Nerf Lord
Posted 11:16am 28/3/13

Disagree. There's lots of activity in the MMO space and 'this scale' is a moving target as technology evolves. Won't be too long before fully-fledged MMOs can be authored by indies with a decent engine IMO.Also, I think EA at least broke even on SWTOR? They sold a s***load of boxes + a few months subs.

It was rumoured to cost 300 million or more, and that was the price being thrown around a few years a back before a few years of additional dev and maintenance time.

From what I remember, they originally had 1 million subscribers (and I doubt they'd get the full box price, I paid $15 online last year), and I think that it was after the first month or something that a lot of people were reporting being disillusioned, and it dropped to something like 400,000 subs.

The free to play market seems to be netting them some decent sales, the servers are flooded with the gear and they've been pumping out particularly high quality stuff through it for a few solid months, which seems to indicate that it's doing well.

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Hogfather
Posted 11:29am 28/3/13

A year ago they'd sold over 2M copies at full retail: http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/02/01/ea-reveals-swtor-subscription-and-sales-numbers-beats-financial/

That's what, 120M not including subs ?, if they haven't broken even it will have been close IMO. Wiki claims 150-200M dev costs:

Although BioWare has not disclosed development costs, industry leaders and financial analysts have estimated it to be between $150 million and $200 million. If accurate, this would make it the most expensive video game ever developed.[9][10] The game had 1 million subscribers within three days of its launch, making it the world's "fastest-growing MMO ever".[11][12] However, in the following months the game lost a fair share of its subscriptions, but has remained profitable.

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Zapo
Posted 12:48pm 28/3/13

When I compare it against Guild Wars 2 I shake my head in disappointment. It's at least 5 years too late to market.

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Hogfather
Posted 01:54pm 28/3/13

Too late, too little, too lame, too buggy.

The only truly good thing about it is the class stories and you have to endure far too many bulls*** 2000s MMO grind quests to get more story quests.

1/10 would not DL again.

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Nerf Lord
Posted 02:00pm 28/3/13

It's a bit better now than it was at release, with legacy xp letting you speed things up a bit. I've been grinding my way through a few stories every now and again...

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BladeRunner
Posted 02:41pm 28/3/13

If only they made KOTOR 3 they would probably have made some money.

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Phandaal
Posted 09:16pm 28/3/13

So glad I canceled my sub after the first month.

If I'd sunk 100s of hours into this as an Aussie player, I'd be livid just about now.

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deadlyf
Posted 01:10pm 29/3/13

Yeah I didn't like this game but I have no doubt that it was profitable. The problem is that they were hoping for a golden egg laying goose like WoW and so it was considered a failure from a capitalist/stock market point of view but as we all know those guys can s*** bricks when quarterly profit forecasts are met let alone under perform.

I think it's the same thing with gamers, we keep expecting the next WoW killer so if a game doesn't dominate we think it has failed.

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Nerf Lord
Posted 08:46pm 03/6/13

They're offering free character transfers for APEC->US as of Tuesday, might be a safer bet then waiting until the auto move. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=6378719#edit6378719

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Tollaz0r!
Posted 09:19pm 03/6/13

Pretty sure EVE is a MMO and doing quite well.

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