VG247

Investors have been scared away from EA by an analyst’s prediction that Star Wars: The Old republic won’t live up to prior expectations.

Brean Murray Carret & Co issued a note to investors on Thursday morning, slashing its price target on EA stock from $22 to $28. Analyst Todd Mitchell said he had “creeping concerns” over Star Wars: the Old Republic’s profitability.

“Specifically, initial sales appear to be below expectations, and casual observation of early play is causing us to rethink our churn assumptions,” Mitchell said, as reported by MarketWatch.

Investors were so spooked by the warning that EA stock took a beating, dropping almost 3% to $17.75.

EA and BioWare have expressed nothing but satisfaction with the launch so far.

http://www.vg247.com/2012/01/20/ea-stock-drops-3-after-analyst-expresses-doubts-on-swtor/

The biggest cause for concern in the game is the PvP. In the 1.1 update, they changed how PvP worked on Ilum, which really screwed things up (see videos of Empire players spawn camping/raping Republic players in massive numbers). They changed this with another patch, but I don't remember how. Anyway, I think that while players do have a right to complain, some may have overreacted a bit. Some of the posts on the forums have been listing every bug in the game and complaining that they aren't fixed yet... while failing to realize that some of them may take some serious time to fix, and get right.

It all comes down to how Bioware continues to handle things (not well so far, but I expect they'll be doing better shortly, considering the massive amount of hate they're getting right now), and how fast they can fix the endgame content to satisfy those who are already there.

For people like me, this isn't an issue at all. I never liked PvP, and I much prefer the PvE side of things. I'm still enjoying the stories for all the characters, and it'll take me forever before I even consider getting into any endgame content. I think that for most casual players, they won't really care about this for a long time, until they're done messing around with the different stories and stuff like that.