EA CFO Eric Brown, in a conference call to investors, said EA CFO Eric Brown didn’t know what he was talking about when he said Old Republic was EA’s largest project ever.

“At half a million subscribers, the game is substantially profitable, but it’s not the kind of thing we would write home about,” EA CFO Eric Brown said in a Gamasutra-attended conference call accompanying EA’s third quarter fiscal earnings report today. “Anything north of a million subscribers, it’s a very profitable business.”

Brown stressed to investors that the costs being incurred now would “essentially turn on a dime” to profits the day the title ships, a date still targeted for sometime after March but before the end of calendar 2012

This, of course, contradicts reports from respected analysts and somewhat less respected bloggers that Old Republic would require 1m subscribers for a profit and 2m to be truly successful. Brown’s response: don’t believe a word those crazy Interweb people say!

“There’s been a fair amount of talk on various blogs describing [Old Republic development] spends that are vastly higher than anything we’ve ever put in place,” he said.

“Don’t read gamer blogs as having any substance. They bring a chuckle, but they also bring a frustration for those that are being responsible with the management of EA’s R&D dollars.”

We at Broken Toys take a simple joy in the fact that we can bring substance-free humor to the desktops of EA executives everywhere.

2004: Developer SOE today announced that Everquest 2 will become the first fully-voiced MMO.

(Edit: although to be fair, the trailer is awesome.)

As I have stated before, these are terms that do not exist in Star Wars.

 

Thread closed.

The fine, fine moderate journalists at Kotaku thus immediately posted a story with the words “BIOWARE: THERE ARE NO GAYS IN STAR WARS” which caused the nerd rage to explode into a fury of POLITICAL nerd rage, ending only with Dahlberg apologizing directly to the player making the original post.

Well, isn’t that special. My take on all this:

• This isn’t a tempest in a teapot, it’s a tempest in a thimble that may someday, possibly, hold a tea leaf. The “community” for SW:TOR doesn’t have a lot of actual game to discuss, so they talk about things like, oh, the political implication of words in your censor file. This is a pretty powerful argument that there’s no real reason to, you know, host forums for a game that is years from actually technically existing. The rabid fans who want to discuss their own personal views of how SW:TOR will implement womprat husbandry can do so on someone else’s dime. Kotaku wouldn’t have cared less if IGN added “lesbian” to their autocensor filter.
• But say TOR was actually in beta, or up and running. My initial reaction is that there’s a suite of topics, mostly involving politics, religion, and the various convergences thereof, that simply aren’t appropriate for an official MMO discussion board. There are many topics that you just simply don’t want to worry about moderating. An intelligent moderation is key here – discussing LGBT-friendly guilds and issues raised from that (mostly involving 12 year olds saying “ghey” a lot) is on topic. Discussing your views on California’s Proposition 8 isn’t.  Real world politics is not a morass you want to dive into, because people with very valid opinions that differ violently from yours are still your paying customers. Note: simply adding words like “lesbian”, “gay”, “mormon” and “Arlen Spector” to your autocensor file does not count as  intelligent moderation.
• Gay marraige is a third rail at the moment. The folks at Turbine (who have tended to be fairly liberal politically) punted on the issue for LOTRO by simply saying that it didn’t work with the license. Blizzard has been fairly conservative on the issue, to much distress. (Ironically, one of the guild names listed in that story as protesting Blizzard’s actions is a crystal clear TOS violation, or would be if anyone at Blizzard knew what it meant. Hint: it’s not Stonewall Champions!)  There is no good answer here. If you disallow same-sex marraige, you piss off a solid minority of your player base. If you allow same-sex marriage, you piss off a solid minority of your player base. If you disallow ANY marriage, you piss off a solid majority of your player base. So really, just do what you feel is right, since there’s no right answer here. I tend to the Sims solution – just let the players do what they want, and be completely agnostic about it. Which – not surprisingly – will piss off a solid minority of your player base.
• You guys DO know Alec Guiness was bisexual, right?
• Sanya Weathers thinks the issue is a bit simpler.

In case you’re wondering, I think that banning any kind of virtual relationship between avatars makes you look like a reactionary monkey. I also think that most in game relationships are between people who are male in the physical world. Finally, I think that if the Jedi council were real, they would think this entire discussion is for mental midgets without any awareness or comprehension of the serious issues endangering the citizens of the galaxy.

The REAL question of course, is which way Boba Fett swings. Because, you know, which ever way he does? That way is correct.