Investor conference call time! Which means it was also time for rampant speculation on what we may know or not know about when SWTOR will be released. When the dust settled, and Stephen Reid hopped onto the official forums, it turned out that nothing had really changed — the fans just like to get excited whenever there is release date talk.
The facts:
- SWTOR is still targeted for holiday release, which means sometime before the end of 2011
More Release Window and Comments after the jump.
- Brown speculated that EA Games might be ready to announce a release date “towards the end of October.”
- EA Games CFO Eric Brown once again mentioned the possibility of release slipping into the “March quarter.”
- SWTOR is a gigantic endeavor and it would be unrealistic to think that some kind of delay is outside the realm of possibility. Hence, BioWare’s use of words like “targeting” and “aiming.”
Stephen Reid provided partial transcript of Eric Brown’s relevant statements (emphasis his):
In terms of timing, again, we haven’t given a street date yet. We won’t do so for some time, possibly at our next upcoming earnings call towards the end of October. We’re in beta testing mode. We’re expanding the scalability of the testing. It’s not about working to complete content. We feel very good about the content. That’s ready to go. It’s about tuning the game to make sure, for example, we can get the level of concurrent users per server cluster that we want. That the response time is what people would expect. So the factor, just to reiterate what we said last earnings call about timing, we expect to ship Star Wars by the end of this calendar year.
But we did hold out a slight possibility that it could slip to our March quarter. And the factors that would cause a slip is, for example, us not being completely satisfied with the scalability testing, and wanting to tune it for several extra weeks. So what’s important to us here is not Month One, Month Two, but this is going to be a multi-year, consider it a ten year journey, an investment in an MMO. And if we get it right in terms of scalability, the response time, the first people that enter the product will be key influencers. We want those key influencers to have a great experience because that will help in a viral fashion to spin up demand.
Read Stephen Reid’s full post here. Read Darth Hater’s live blog here.