According to Electronic Arts over a million gamers worldwide celebrated the holidays in front of their PCs playing BioWare's MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Over the weekend, players spent over 5.5 million hours playing the game, according to EA.
SWTOR has hit a number of other milestones in the first week of release, according to EA:
- Over 60 million in-game hours — roughly equivalent to watching all six Star Wars movies over 4 million times
- Over 850,000 Sith Warriors and over 810,000 Jedi Knights created
- Over 260 million quests completed
- Over 44 million PvP battles
- Over 9 million space combat missions completed
- Over 3 billion NPCs killed
That one million registered users figure is based on North American and European user data, with a slight lean towards customers in Europe, according to financial analyst group Baird Equity Research. Analyst Sebastian Colin says the following:
"More than 1 million registered users, skewing slightly to Europe. We believe Star Wars is off to a good start, although it is unclear whether the 1 million+ registered users include paid registration codes or both paid and unpaid codes. Based on our analysis of EA server data, roughly two-thirds of the 91 European servers are seeing heavy use or are full (see figure 1), with roughly half of the 124 U.S. servers seeing heavy use or are full (see figure 2). According to EA, users logged more than 5.5 million hours of game-play over the weekend.
We estimate 350k peak concurrent users on >200 servers. We view the early success of Star Wars as an indication of a healthy MMO market. While there is likely some shifting of usage from ATVI’s World of Warcraft, we see a viable market for multiple million-user MMOs in the U.S. and Europe. With more than 1 million registered online users, we see roughly one-third (or roughly 350k) representing peak concurrent usage. Maintain Neutral rating and $25 price target, which is based on 15x our F2013 EPS estimate of $1.22 plus cash."
