Star Wars The Old Republic is already shedding hundreds of thousands of monthly subscribers only a few months after the PC MMO was launched by developer BioWare and publisher Electronic Arts.
As part of its quarterly financial press release today, EA admitted that the game only had 1.3 million active subscribers in the first quarter of 2012. That"s well below the 1.7 million active subscribers that EA said The Old Republic had when the game launched back in December 2011.
Overall, EA said it generated $977 million in revenues for the quarter that ended on March 31, compared to $995 million for the same period a year ago. Today"s numbers were slightly ahead of estimates. EA said the revenues were due in part to strong sales of games such as Mass Effect 3, FIFA Street 4, SSX and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.
Net income of EA came in at $400 million for the last quarter, well ahead of the $151 million in net income from the same period a year ago. EA said that for its last fiscal year, it generated $1.2 billion in revenue via digital properties. That includes $150 million from EA"s Origin download store in its first 10 months of going live. Full game downloads generated $60 million in revenue in the last quarter for the publisher.
EA also said that it would be investing $80 million to develop games for "Gen4 console systems". That likely means the successors of the Xbox 360 and the PS3 consoles.