You need months of different flavors of beta testing before making a product generally available

Several major gaming news outlets have reported that EA’s CFO Eric Brown hinted during today’s Lazard Capital Markets Technology and Media Conference that Star Wars the Old Republic will not be releasing before July 1. Here’s the transcription of what he said that made people conclude this:

So we said it’s going to launch sometime in calendar, but not within Fiscal 11 … So that basically pens down between, you know, April 1st and December 31st of this calendar year.
…
It’s also reasonable to infer that it’s not in our Q1 guidance. We gave Q1 Fiscal 11, Fiscal 12 non-gap revenue guidance, minus 39 minus 44 cents and I think it’s not unreasonable to infer that it’s not included in that 90 day period.

Darth Hater has a full transcript of all the things said at the conference pertaining to the Old Republic and you can read it here.
The more important things to note are:

• You need months of different flavors of beta testing before making a product generally available (closed beta, semi-closed beta and open beta were mentioned)
• We’ll talk more about Star Wars at the coming E3 event
• Paraphrase: they want to cater to both experienced MMO player as well as newcomers to the genre (non-gamer Star Wars fans)
• We have nothing ruled out, in terms of intent or design future micro-transactions because some interesting opportunities is there. The key is you know, what to include in a base monthly fee versus what do you charge extra for? So that requires some pretty careful decisions making.
  but
  For now we’re focused on the more traditional monthly subscription model but

News was also reported by Massively and vg247 and it seems that TOR Legends were the first to report the story.

Although this should not come as a surprise to anyone we can’t think of a better comment to this than point you to this website here. Feel free to push the button several times.

Tags: release date