Live Blog starts at 2pm PT
2:02: Starting now.
2:03: John Riccitiello: Strong preorders for The Old Republic.
2:06: JR: "We believe that Origin will scale quickly with the addition of third parties and with the launch of Battlefield 3 and Star Wars later this year."
2:14: Eric Brown: "Star Wars: The Old Republic is targeted to launch in holiday of 2011, but our guidance range accounts for a range of ship dates within the fiscal year."
2:17: EB: "In the second half, we expect to begin seeing a more ratable and profitable P&L based on subscription revenue growth from Star Wars: The Old Republic and leverage from higher unit sales of key owned IP, such as Battlefield 3."
2:19: Principle driver is SWTOR, start the year with development costs, end the year with high margin digital and retail profits.
2:24: JR: - speaking about Fiscal year 2012 - "It is about some explosive programs and tangible objectives which will mark FY12 as a positive inflection point for EA. Among the most exciting are these: We will launch Star Wars: The Old Republic and compete for a big slice of the MMO market.
2:26: Q&A session starting.
2:29: Question from Brian Karimzad(sp) from Goldman-Sachs: "One on The Old Republic, can you help us understand how the capacity management is going to work at launch, what kind of lead times you have to add capacity and how do you plan to manage the effect of people wanting to level up with their friends together as demand starts to significantly exceed the capacity out of the gate?"
Eric Brown: "I think we're in pretty good shape to do that. We've got a very aggressive plan to be able to scale multiple millions of users coming into the Star Wars franchise in service this fall. We're looking at preorder campaigns and telemetry coming in from retail as well as online to get a sense of the overall base and it's very strong. We're pretty relaxed about what we're going to be able to achieve there. We will be able to scale up in light of new servers on a very quick base. We've got a plan to do that over the months following ship. We have a lot of capacity built into that."
2:31: Question from Edward Williams at BMO Capital Markets: "A couple questions also on Star Wars. Can you talk a little bit about what you see as being the size of the MMORPG market as a whole, as you look at North American and Europe, how you go about trying to get a sense for the scale and interest in that specific genre? Also, in terms of Star Wars is this something we should kind of look for after the fact in terms of when we can get some details and thinking about modeling it, and looking at how preorders have gone? Are we going to hear about that after the fact or kind of leading to it?"
EB "I think on the next call we'll definitely be briefing you in more detail on how the launch is shaping up and how we're tracking there. In terms of your second part, the MMO category is extremely large. It's a tens of millions people opportunity for us both in Europe and the West. It's not only personified by World of Warcraft but you see a lot of other games in there like the Runescapes, the Maple Story's, that qualify as MMO's that contribute to that overall market size. We feel very bullish to feel like we can come into this category with a fresh offering, something that's brand new that appeals to the majority of that category. It's a category that hasn't seen a lot of releases that have hit scale over the years and we feel like we're in a good position to pick up on a lot of latent demand; frankly, people who've played Warcraft, which is the market leader, and lapsed and bring them back in and activate them that way. So, it's a big segment. It's a strong segment and I think the response on preorders over the last five days has indicated that we've got something that's going to appeal to that overall market."
JR: "A couple of added points. There are about as many definitions of what's included in the RPG MMO market Our internal market based on what we've included shows it in the double digit millions of subscribers in the Western markets. Twelve to fourteen depending on whats included or not and higher if you start including the lower-price-per-month competitors. What we've told folks is that this is a product that would make profitability at about a half-a-million subs. At about a million subs it's good business, it makes good money on an ongoing basis but it doesn't feel good about the historical investment. Anything north of a million, as we approach a million-and-a-half or 2, it starts to look like a great investment that justifies the price in a very positive way."
2:49: Q: "Just curious on Star Wars, you said record preorders. I was hoping you could wrap some context for us on that and maybe specifically how preorders for that game are pacing your expectations. Also curious on your beta testers, if you can give us any updates there and perhaps what you're seeing in terms of your beta testers converting to preorder buys."
Eric Brown: "Sure. I'm not going to give you an actual number yet on the preorders. I want to get through the first week and have all the telemetry come in. But, in general the preorders are ahead of our expectations on Star Wars. It's ahead of the curve that we plotted for what we need to do in terms of reaching our goals. It's the largest number we've done at EA in comparison to other titles. The next closest title is Battlefield 3 and it was up significantly from there. In terms of the beta test, we have thousands of people in a current beta test going on right now and we're learning a lot of great things and getting a lot of great telemetry that's improving the game every new release. The purchase intent through third-party research companies is some of the highest numbers they've ever seen. So, some of our partners on that front have come back and given us extraordinarily high conversion rates from who's actually in the game and playing it through 10 levels, 20 levels, and so on. As we get into the bulk of the summer we're going to be ramping up our beta campaign and by the time we get to around September we'll be in a position to really call the ball give the hard ship date."
JR: "What I was hoping for when we introduced [Origin] last month was to get through the preorder launch of Star Wars without falling over. I know that may sound like a low bar, but that was actually an important issue for a very complicated system that underlies Origin and the team nailed that with flying colors."
2:59: Q: "Regarding the Star Wars launch date, can you give us some idea of what potential range of impacts there could be depending on the launch date within the holiday period? Would there be any impact on the contribution from Star Wars in the subsequent quarter or beyond that depending on what quarter it launches?" JR: "While we're targeting Q3 for the launch of Star Wars, we recognized the possibility that through beta testing feedback and/or operational scaling that there's a possibility that we might move the title into Q4. We have high expectations for the potential for the product. The one mistake we don't want to make is if there is an issue is to make sure that we ship the right product. We don't think that the long term ship window is going to change that. Most MMOs have been announced, in term of ship date, 4-8 weeks prior to introduction. That's fairly standard. "People have target quarters, but whether it's World of Warcraft, it was our last launch or Sony's last launch, 4-6 weeks is relatively typical. You usually want to have high-scale testing completed and under your belt before you open it up to the paying consumer because the paying consumer can be very harsh. They have high expectations: perfect performance. That's what we intend to provide at launch."
Quelle:
www.darthhater.com
Hmm... Q3 als Plan mit Option auf Q4. Wobei ich immernoch dabei bleibe das es im November, frühestens aber Ende Oktober erscheinen wird.
