A lot of people on these boards talk about whether they think TESO will be a success or a failure. My personal opinion is that this will be an enormous success. However, I think some of us have different ideas of what a failure is.

SWTOR is often cited as an epic failure in the MMO world. Do people that say such things consider that SWTOR returned a profit, just from box sales alone? From their investors' points of view, SWTOR was an incredible success.

How does that translate to TES? If you are the sort of person that thinks TESO will "fail," what is your criteria? What would you consider a success? And if you are the sort of person that thinks TESO will succeed, what are your guidelines? What would constitute a success to you?

As for me, I think the game needs to ROI, and maintain an active player base for 3-5 years to be a success. Any game that runs for years and profits has to be considered successful, does it not?

Good point

EA wanted it to last 10 year. http://www.swtorstrategies.com/2010/12/ea-old-republic-will-have-ten-year-lifespan.html

Aye, I want to see that! Also EA dreamed of 500k subs. I bet its less than 100k currrently.

I cant say devs are really happy how things are going currently. They use 5-7 year and some of them doesnt even double their money. Not to mention all layoffs, people always lose jobs. GW2 seems to be one of the best success stories for long time, but come on, we all see how people like to lick Anet's ass, I estimated it cost 50 mill, and already 2 mill fully priced copies sold that sounds nice. As for EA, I bet they made loss even EA trolls says otherwise.

Who's to say SWTOR won't last ten years?

EA never "dreamed" of 500k subs. All they said is they needed to only maintain that number to turn a profit. EA easily excelled that number in the initial days when SWTOR sold over 2.1 million copies As far as your "bet," it was reported over a month ago that the population of SWTOR is just under one million. The game is still far above 500k subs and the boost from the F2P model coming in November will certainly help increase profitability.

GW2 has only been out a few months so it's not logical to really calculate how successful the game is currently. It had a decently successful launch, but nothing incredible or anywhere as huge as many people expected. We'll have to see a year or so down the line how GW2 is still fairing when newer MMOs release and the industry changes course.

As far as what I believe is the fundamental explanation for an MMO being successful:
- It is able to generate a profit consistently over many years.
That in return would indicate that most MMORPGs are actually successes. Very few MMOs don't turn a profit and the ones that don't are often shut down because of it (actual failures). MMORPGs that either under-perform or cannot maintain their large player base due to lack of long-term incentives, resort to F2P models in order to reinvigorate profitability and maintain profit margins for the company. For most MMOs they only require a couple hundred thousand players to actually be profitable.