I stumbled across this little gem tonight, and it got me fuming:
Shares of Electronic Arts Inc. fell nearly 3% to $17.75 on Thursday morning after an analyst with Brean Murray Carret & Co. cut his price target on the stock to $22 from $28, citing concerns about the recently released online multi-player game “Star Wars: The Old Republic.” In a note to clients, analyst Todd Mitchell wrote that “creeping concerns” about the performance of “Star Wars” — which was released in late December — is causing him to trim his earnings estimates for the 2013 fiscal year. “Specifically, initial sales appear to be below expectations, and casual observation of early play is causing us to rethink our churn assumptions,” Mitchell wrote.
Ok, so one guy who has ‘casually observed’ some early play, combined with some guesswork on sales numbers that only EA / Bioware would know at this point, makes EA shares drop nearly 3%.
Whether you love or hate the game, can you see the insanity in a system that drives perceptions that way? If SWTOR sucks as a game, well that’ll become apparent when people leave it in droves. That’s a better measure than one guy putting making prognostications without nearly no data. It’s the equivalent of this site being the arbiter of whether SWTOR is good for oceanic players or not. We may have an opinion but we don’t package up the little turd nuggets we publish each day and claim them to be expertise from up on high.
My rant’s over but I’d love to hear yours. Do you think one person should be having such an impact?
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I think the analyst has every right to adjust his position due to the negative feeback concerning SWTOR at the moment.
He does have every right… However, he clearly has little understanding of the what MMO subscription based games are all about. It sounds as if he (They) got caught up in reading the typical negativity in the forums. Let me tell you as a day one WOW account holder… There is PLENTY of negativity in the forums. There always will be. You cant please everyone, and there has to be rules in the game. It takes time and development. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that when you add up…
1. A bleeding edge graphic engine
2. 30 year old franchise (SUPER successful)
3. A large population of “Hard Core” gamers that are “Bored” with Wow and others
4. Did I mention that you can Wield a light saber, and wreak havoc on an entire universe? Its just tons of fun. Really…
Things I will be judging them on (Quietly) are
1. User interface customization
2. End game content <~~~ Very important for the hard core group.
3. Grouping players has to be easy and quick. <~~~ It took years for blilzzard to figure this out.
4. Challenging group based content (It really cant be easy)
5. On-going story line that taps into the "Hard Core end game" gamers that enjoy the challenge and make a guild or group of gamers proud to have completed some really hard content.
He (They) must be a short traders 😀
May the force be with you!
Signed…
A EA stock holder
There are huge numbers of players leaving over the way the game is dealing or should I say not dealing with the players. They need to learn to at least pretend to be listening. Communications is key
This exact same post has been said about every MMO ever made, including WoW. A bunch of forum whiners doesn’t mean anything.
Funny pple saying pple are leaving in masses when there are no facts to support such a ridiculous claim. Get real facts n numbers b4 stating they have left in masses. If you look at every launch in history n they were 1000 times worse than swtor was at launch and people left those too including wow. So get a life n back it by numbers b4 making a hate/troll post
you obviously do not understand english very well…
Lol put your reading glasses back on.
Well it is fairly typical of so called expert analysts putting their subjective 2 cents worth in, with negative impacts on shares. All it does is fuel consumer trepidation on the market. Analysts have too much sway on markets with their “informed opinions”. So far all I’ve seen is positive commentary on TOR. One only needs to look at Metacritic and sales data released by EA. EA itself admitted it never intended to make ROI on SWTOR.
” EA itself admitted it never intended to make ROI on SWTOR.” Stupidest sentence ever written. The only reason a business would do anything is to make a ROI. Maybe they don’t expect to make a ROI in 1 week, 1 month, 1 year, but they are betting that the money put into the game will return more than what was put in.
That is exactly how the entire market works. Many analysts base an opinion without real knowledge and they impact the market or a stock. Once the information is determined to be bogus people will buy the stock back up again. Odds are people are releasing this info and playing the impact, this should be illegal, but it is not.