Forum Friday: Release Window Speculation
It’s Friday once again and while we all wait to see what kind of information is given out on golden platters of awesomeness, i bring to you another post from the bowels of the Swtor forums. This week I jump on ship to tackle one of the bigger questions that EVERYONE is dying to know, the release date and the possible outcomes of what that might be. You can find one of the many official forum posts located here if you wish to choose through everyone’s thoughts, dreams and hopes of when it might be.
DISCLAIMER: Everything said in this article is the personal opinion of its author and does not represent any official information from Bioware. This is a speculative article and please treat it as such.
Lets jump right in on what I think. For me, I see the release coming in a September time-frame. Why? Well, I look at it like this. E3 happens in June and I expect some good information regarding aspects of the game to come out. I do not expect the release date to be given but I do think that a time frame for more beta invites to start happening to come up. The amount of time they stay in these beta phases will also play into realizing when the game really does launch.
For these phases of beta, I’d say a month, or slightly longer depending on what Bioware is really testing for game play. So June E3 announcement, beta invites middle to end of June. July given to players to get into beta.
Side note, Bioware, I’d prefer short waves for this and wipes after each wave. Lets keep the higher level content unknown so that when I go to an area or do a Flash-point, there isn’t some gaming sites out there all ready with official strategies on how each and every single mob is to be killed in what fashion.
Back on topic, so, July starts beta testing going possibly into August. You then take time to give everyone a break. This comes with a pricing plan, subscription options, release date and even box types. So in August, we should have already have these out to the masses and pre-orders already started ( I’d expect this information to have been released mid July and pre-orders starting first of August). So with pre-orders you have levels of head starts.
Head starts you say? Yes. Why? Well, if you look at the sheer number of players that are playing MMO’s these days, head starts play very well into server stability and gives the devs time to deploy more servers as needed. The guild program will help, but I am sure there are plenty of people that will join the game and not be guilded at first. I also think these will be tied to box/digital download type. Collector Editions will probably have a 3 to 5 day window while regular sells will be 2 to 3.
So, giving times for final patching and getting the boxes/digital download up to par after the final beta phase ends somewhere around the middle of August, I see the game possibly releasing either September 13th or September 20th. I know this isn’t perfect but it’s my theory, you don’t have to make it yours. There are still plenty of things that can change at any moment and only Bioware really knows when they game is planned to ship.
There is still the details of the Guild Program (E3 information most likely) to go through and how that plays into effect. There is details on how exactly the digital download works and where it will be hosted. We don’t even know what the Collectors Edition will be ( Most wanted information that I am looking forward too). So honestly, all this theorizing could be for nothing and be nowhere near to the actual date. hell, after today (Friday), we may never get to play the game at all.
10 Responses to “Forum Friday: Release Window Speculation”
I want to go digital whenever possible, but with many providers moving toward capped usage rates, it makes me nervous…
But really, CE Info would be amazing.
Nice. Agree completely.
It all sounds reasonable. But Beta stages usually run for 2-3 months. I was recently thinking if they are so ‘desperately’ using (2011) as a release window, they can release the game on December the 31st, 2011 as well. It would still be 2011, right? This is of course exaggeration but lets be truthful to ourselves – if there is no significant announcement during E3 – the game will still be in development for a few months after that. We know based on EA CFO words that during E3 Bioware will give us some Beta related information. Which could be “Hey guys, we plan to start more aggressive Beta in August” or something like that. Which brings us to December release.
If you ask me, it doesn’t make sense that Bioware plans for Fall release. Everybody knows that Fall was never a good release date. New semester starts in Fall, a lot of competition on gaming market, many great games will be released this fall. Even though SWTOR is gigantic title and event in the world of MMORPGs wrong time to release the game can significantly affect the subscription numbers. Take an icecream for example. There is no point to sell it during the Fall or Winter because its a cold time of the year. However if you open your little ice-cream store during the Summer – you’ll make much better profit.
Same with MMOs. To capture as bigger playerbase as possible it has to be released at appropriate time. If its not, playerbase will eventually grow to necessary numbers, but it will happen at a much slower rate than if the game was released NOT during the busy time for students and NOT when there are so many other competitive games on the market.
Also septmeber see’s the bluray release of the star wars movies so it would be the perfect tie-in to that event.
I dont see the friday update up here yet so i will say congratulations here!!!!
awesome you are in the fan-site spotlight 8D
Cheers again, Tim!
I agree with Ralph in that the Blu-Ray release would a great opportunity, and so too would Drew Karpyshyn’s upcoming “Revan” novel. However, we’ve already been wrong about that once before.
Paul S. Kemp’s “Deceived” novel was originally going to be released in December of 2010, but was pushed back to March of 2011. Paul himself said that he understood that “the move was made because there is a desire to time the release of the novel nearer to the release of the Old Republic MMORPG.” Nothing is ever official until it’s… official™ I suppose, so I guess I don’t want to get my hopes up quite yet.
Great article bud, I like it when you speculate. 🙂
I am not sure where i fall on this even now. i know based on hands on time that the game is rock solid and could release at any time though. There are still so many things they are working on getting into game though that it makes me wonder.
I hope you are right and it releases then, I will still go with my original prediction of late november-ish. I don’t have any good facts to base that on, or other tie ins really, it is just what “feels right” to me.
Thank you all for taking time to stop by here and comment we appreciate it and thanks Tim! 🙂
I hope you are right about Sept. I don’t even want to wait that long. 😉
@Andrew
Actually not many true betas last that long. blizzard released Warcraft after their Closed Beta started opening up. They had a Stress Test that gave us a weekend of play-time then went straight into a Open Beta for about a week.
Couple days after the Open closed, they launched.
It’s still all speculation though as this is Bioware and nobody knows what Bioware is going to do except them.
Man, am I hoping you’re right. I don’t think I’ve ever been this stoked for the release of a game.
The cynic in me is telling me that we might be looking at a Winter or Spring 2012 release, but such thoughts are born of fear and we all know where that leads…