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There is, of course, the fact that the game delivered did not match many playersвЂ™ expectations of what a Star Wars game is like. The game made money I donвЂ™t know whether it made enough. This likely made all parties involved have to have a higher bar for success.

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(you have to scroll pretty far down on the list of best-selling PC games before you find one that is an intellectual property from outside games). Certainly the history of Star Wars games doesnвЂ™t suggest that just because a game is Star Wars, it will be a hit, or sell disproportionately solely on that basis.

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For example, if you look at the power of licensed IP game genres outside of sports, itвЂ™s really not very clear that a license can or will imply a massive increase in game trials or purchases. Some of these expectations in hindsight can be seen as plain erroneous. We didnвЂ™t do anything to reduce them either. Like, 1/4 of the budget or less of a WoW.Д«ut there are expectations. Lastly, SWG was a lot cheaper to make than what was about to be its competition. It did lose some of its conversion rate - probably something we can credit to WoWвЂ™s buttery smooth experience. (This makes sense - it was the least like WoW, after all). In fact, SWG lost less users to WoW than any other SOE game. It did have a churn problem, and exit surveys showed all the top answers for why people left were вЂњlack of content.вЂќ This was largely attributable to things like the combat balance, the lack of quests, and so on. That said, it was picking up more new users a day than all other SOE games combined, even after the CU. Early reviews and launch buzz were mixed at best. It took two years for it to hit a number that big (unlike WoW, which shot up incredibly fast). SWG did not sell a million units instantly, and then lose them all, as many claim. But the bottom line is that SWG had the highest percentage of its user base logging in every month out of any SOE game, again by double-digit percentages. Note that lower session lengths naturally equals lower concurrency numbers. In other words, it was the least grindy per session, and the most sticky on a week or month basis. However, at the same time, it also had the highest total hours played per week. These days, people think of SWG as grindy, but it actually had the fastest advancement of any MMO at the time it came out. These things seem to have worked as intended.

It also had a lot of features designed to attract players beyond the core. Time sinks had historically been a huge barrier to adoption of MMOs by audiences beyond the core.

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This had very much been a design goal: mission terminals, offline crafting and harvesting, etc., were designed to provide exactly this result in order to make MMOs more accessible. SWG also had the shortest play session lengths of any RPG at SOE (action games, including Planetside, had shorter). (In addition, the newbie experience was redone many times, including four times just in the first two years none of these changed the conversion at all). Given the one-month period, you canвЂ™t attribute that just to the Star Wars license. More new players decided to stick it out past one month. Galaxies actually had the best one-month conversion of any game at SOE, by a double-digit percentage. So, letвЂ™s start by tackling some of those: There are a lot of assumptions out there about how the game did, particularly in its original form. I was asked some questions by a former player, and for once, it just felt like the time to answer them. ItвЂ™s also ten years since the NGE, and in the last few years, we have seen a lot of changes for a lot of parties involved. This past week was the fifteenth anniversary of that small SWG team first forming in Austin, refugees from Origin.

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IвЂ™ve gotten a lot of questions as to why I am writing this series of posts about Star Wars Galaxies now. HereвЂ™s hoping youвЂ™ll all care as deeply about the next game I makeвЂ¦ Why now? I must say, the response to these essays has astonished me. I am sure there are plenty of other things to say and more questions that could be answered, butвЂ¦ it feels like a natural stopping point. This is the last post on SWG for, well, a while. This article, and much more, is available in my book Postmortems: Selected Essays Volume One.

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