Electronic Arts, soon releasing the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, has previously said that they only need about half a million subscribers to make a profit. So how many people did their recent beta attract? 2.4 million people registered for their recent beta, with more than 725,000 unique visitors logging in during the Thanksgiving weekend — 250,000 concurrently at the peak. That’s a good sign for the launch success of The Old Republic.
Star Wars: The Old Republic releases in two weeks, December 20.
Benton Sartore has been reading comic books off and on since his age was in single digits, and playing RPGs since college. His bookshelf is now full of 1960s Marvel Comics, Batman trades, and Star Wars comics, and he's been known to DM Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons, and Serenity. He's most proud of his DVD collection — Joss Whedon is his master now.
Benton is also an acting editor at In Genre. 
Merin on 
Considering how HARD they PUSHED for the beta, though – given beta keys through TONS of gaming websites, spamming the BSN with keys, etc.
That’s actually not that impressive.
“It looks like League of Legends has really hit the big-time. In a press release today, Riot Games announced that its popular free-to-play MOBA title has surpassed 11.5 million active players. To put that into perspective for you MMO gaming folks, when Blizzard last announced its World of Warcraft figures, the game weighed in at about 10.3 million active players. To put the icing on the cake, Riot notes that League of Legends has about 1.3 million players at peak times each day, whereas the current game du jour, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, reports about 250,000 concurrent players at peak times on Steam.” – http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/11/18/league-of-legends-surpasses-11-5-million-active-players/
LoL is the part I went to look for, but it reminded me that Skyrim has an average of 250k (I’d read elsewhere 300k) active players on Steam, dwarfing the next runners up (usually Call of Duty, which is a mostly multi-player game).
I’m not knocking TOR – it’s, as the British might say, “a bit of alright” – but this just sounds to me like how HARD EA and BioWare pushed their DA2 presales numbers (record breaking at the time) and how quickly they reached 1 million units shipped (faster than DA:O, they crowed!) – but if you look are reviews and overall sales of DA2, that’s ALL they have to cheer.
TOR won’t be a WoW killer… and I’m not even sure it’ll be the second best thing, though it might be the second best “subscription based” MMO in users… for a little bit, at the start.
More impressive than even LoL, perhaps, is Minecraft.
“Minecraft has been around since 2009, but only received a formal release last Friday, with the Minecraft 1.0 iteration. Despite this, the game has more than 16 million registered users and has already sold over 4 million copies. Following the release of Minecraft 1.0, Gamefront have reported that logins to the game jumped from 1,000 per second to 4,000 per second. That’s a remarkable uptake for an indie game, showing that the game industry isn’t just for giants only, particularly if you have an open-ended game that encourages users to be creative as Minecraft does.
Minecraft is currently attracting around 241,920,000 logins every single month, from players who have helped it generate an estimated $50 million in revenue since launch. Pretty impressive figures for a game that was initially created by one person, Markus Persson, and has been distributed without the support of a major digital distribution service such as Steam.” – http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/21/indie-game-minecraft-receiving-over-240-million-logins-every-month/
for the record, I’ve never played either LoL or Minecraft and would MUCH rather play TOR… but EA sure likes to create illusions of major events with their games…
Not much of a beta if it has two million people playing, is it? More like a limited release…
I’ve always felt very out-of-place in this “geek” community of ours in that I like the idea of MMOs, but I seem to always lose interest after a few months or so. It makes me feel like I’m missing some vital part of my DNA.