Today is the first day that Star Wars: The Old Republic is available to the public that didn’t pre-order the MMO, and analysts are predicting that the game is off to a great start. One analyst believes that judging by the server density and the number of servers currently hosting games, that the game could be housing “as many as 1.5 million” adventurers.
“Based on the number of servers now in operation, and the relatively high densities thereon, we feel fairly comfortable estimating that the game already has in excess of 1 million players, and potentially could have as many as 1.5 million, with the official launch date of the game yet to come,” Doug Creutz, of Cowen & Company postulates.
“We note that EA gives players the first month free, so ‘players’ does not yet signify paying subscribers; however, our estimate does at least signify the number of people who have bought the game (and thus far, includes only a subset of those who pre-ordered the title).”
“Our (very rough) estimate is based on (1) Star Wars now has 29 percent as many servers in operation as World of Warcraft in North America and Europe; (2) the average player density (relative to server capacity) on the Star Wars servers appears higher than it is on World of Warcraft; and (3) we estimate that World of Warcraft has around 4.0-4.5 million subs in North America/Europe.”
From a commercial standpoint, this is great for Bioware and EA. For players, there’s a different tune being sung. This tune is one that describes horribly long wait times to get into servers, as Bioware scrambles to add more as players continually make their way into the world of SWTOR.
