SWTOR Not Hurting WoW as Much as Some May Think


We just heard from EA’s quarterly earnings call that sales of SWTOR are doing great and that they have 1.7 million active users as of February 1st. This news puts something of a muzzle on the nay-sayers who were accusing SWTOR of being a flop. However, we still return to the comparison of SWTOR vs. WoW and this begs the question: Just how much is Blizzard’s cash cow WoW hurting from the success of SWTOR?

A report on Venture Beat says it might not be as much as we think. They tell us that traffic reports from leading independent community websites for both of these online games show that SWTOR has actually affected WoW very little at this time.

When EA reported a strong number of 1.7 million active SWTOR users on February 1st, it left many industry observers wondering how much this gain had hurt World of Warcraft. The fantasy MMORPG by Activision Blizzard has been dominating the market for subscription MMORGs since its launch in 2004. Customers have to pay a monthly fee between $13 and $15 to continue playing. But user numbers started to crumble lately, with a decline from 11.1 to 10.3 million subscribers in the third quarter of 2011.

So basically what we are learning is that while millions of gamers want to play SWTOR, there are still millions of gamers who want to play WOW and some may even still be subscribed to both. I was definitely one of these gamers who was not ready to give up my WoW subscription, despite how excited I was to play SWTOR.

“SWTOR is going to be the proof that more than just one MMO using the subscription model can do really well.” says Hubert Thieblot, CEO and founder of Curse, Inc.

Maybe too much emphasis is being placed on the two games being competitors in the first place. They appeal to different types of players so how hard is it to think that both could exist and do equally as well at the same time?

Lisa Clark

Lisa has been an avid gamer since she was old enough to hold her first controller and a game writer for more than a decade. A child of the Nintendo generation, she believes they just don’t make games like they used to but sometimes, they make them even better! While consoles will always be her first love, Lisa spends most of her gaming time on the PC these days- on MMOs and first-person shooters in particular.