SWTOR - P&L Anyone?

Hi Gang,

I was bored tonight and having recently returned from SWTOR, I thought I would have a little fun with the sales and dev spend numbers for the Waterworld of videogames. Here's my bank of the napkin profits and losses statement just for the box sales.


Flesharrower's Dirty P&L for SWTOR as of 11 Feb 2012:
(For those that don't business much, M is million and K is thousands)

Sales: 2.12M as of 11th Feb 2012 (per VGchartz.com and matches numbers released by EA on 2/1/12)

MSRP: $60
Wholesale Price: $44.50? ($60 MSRP should be in range of $42.50 to $44.50 wholesale)

Percent of sales via Storefronts/Etailers: 60% or 1.28M
Percent of sales via Origin: 40% or 848K

That gives us:
Storefront Gross Profit: $57M (1.28M * $44.50)
Origin Gross: $50.1m (848K * $60 - being generous, not including overhead)
Add those two up and you get
Gross Profit: $107.1M
Dev Spend: $200M (The single most expensive game ever made)
Net Profit? -$92.9M (that's Net Loss, sorry)

Okay, that model I put up there is all in EA's favor. I did not put in Marketing costs (typically 15-30% of dev spend on AAA titles), did not take out any other costs like COGS, Studio/EA Overhead, the Lucas Arts License, a bunch of other stuff...basically my bottom line there is inflated by at least 20% probably more than 30%.

And kids, no you don't get to use subscription dollars to offset the box revenue. For one thing, they need it for running costs and on-going license fees

NOW, STOP. Don't Freak Out! The game isn't going anywhere in the near future, that investment is too huge to just shut the game down. They will be making every effort to keep it running by spending more money. Eventually the Bantha poodoo is going to hit the fan but I'd say that will be sometime after Summer of this year.

In the end they are in too deep of a hole and are not in the business of just breaking even (and they're way off). Lastly, the sales trend is not good, it was only 28K for the week of 11th Feb.

If anyone is interested, I can share a subscriber trend that I worked on as well...a little more complicated but is based on data EA released in the Q3 results on 2/1/12 basically shows subscribers will be ~346K by December of 2012.

Sad really, it's a cool game. I recently picked up a couple copies so my husband and I could play together. We are really enjoying the game. Maybe they will get a little bit of a boost in sales now that Phantom Menace is out in 3D? I hate to see a game cave so soon after launch :(

Money or no money, mmos rarely vanish (Vanguard is still around) . SWTOR will find equilibrium pretty easily I think. As for the sub fees, I dunno what licenses cost them but operating costs for a system of this kind arn't what they used to be. There is bound to be some profit in there somewhere.

SWTOR has the best PvE of any of the MMOs I've ever played.

Rest assured SW:TOR isn't going anywhere. The lifecycle profit/loss of a MMOG is not based on retail sales of the client alone and I promise neither EA or BioWare expected to recoup their entire development cost in the first couple of months.