The rivalry between Star Wars: The Old Republic and World of Warcraft isn’t limited to just the players, it seems the CEO of Activision Blizzard, Bobby Kotick, has some words for EA during the Reuters Media Summit on Monday.
It seems Mr. Kotick’s isn’t worried about SWTOR taking players away from WoW as he downplayed it during his speech, then went on the offensive stating that he doesn’t think EA will earn much due to licensing rights.
Lucas is going to be the principal beneficiary of the success of Star Wars,” Kotick said. “We’ve been in business with Lucas for a long time and the economics will always accrue to the benefit of Lucas, so I don’t really understand how the economics work for Electronic Arts.”
EA has stated in the past that SWTOR will become profitable once it reaches 500,000 paying subscribers and considering they’ve already hit 900k pre-orders I’d say they have a very good chance of that. While SWTOR might never become as profitable as WoW since Blizzard doesn’t have to pay someone else for licensing costs, there’s little doubt the SWTOR will be successful in term of profits.
Probably because BioWare has a better deal with Lucas than you do, Kotick. After all, BioWare came up with the Old Republic series. Activision isn’t able to do that level of creativity, they just keep spewing out Guitar Hero’s and Call of Duty games that all look the same.
Well said Scythe..Bioware has showed such innovation till now, as I haven’t seen from Activision..And what the market needs nowadays is innovation and not same old style of games, we are full of those already
Too bad Blizzard is laughing now as SWTOR has less population than 5 WoW servers.