SW: The Old Republic Is EA’s Biggest Ever Project

It looks like massively multiplayer online role-playing game (quite a mouthful that) Star Wars: The Old Republic is on a much larger scale than we previously thought.

According to Eric Brown, Chief Financial Officer at Electronic Arts, who today spoke at a Wedbush Morgan Securities get-together, Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG is the “largest ever development project, period, in the history of the company”.

That’s really quite impressive to hear, I mean, Electronic Arts have an enormous history of gaming behind them, and we’re talking huge! Lots of big-name games too. Eric Brown said that a packaged game generally costs about $30 million at EA, but “any MMO costs significantly more than that”.

To give you some indication, Eric Brown estimates that the big daddy MMORPG World of Wacraft has so far cost Blizzard around USD$100 million. “That’s lifetime [research and development] to actually ship it and obviously then there’s maintenance subsequent to ship and expansion packs,” Brown said. Let it be known that no actual figure has been given by EA regarding The Old Republic’s cost, but them comparing it to the monster World of Warcraft’s $100 million budget should give you a rough idea of where costs are with The Old Republic.

At this point in time, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft makes around $100 million a month from subscriptions. EA hopes that Star Wars: The Old Republic will recuperate costs in a similar manner. “MMOs are sizeable undertakings,” commented Brown.

That’s a hell of a lot of cash right there, especially when considering a massive game like God of War III, which cost about $44 million. Or when looking at still-to-come Gran Turismo 5, which apparently has a budget of over $60 million.

Old Republic Is EA’s Biggest Ever Development Project [Kotaku]
SWTOR is EA’s “largest ever” project [Eurogamer]