It feels like every so often an MMORPG comes along that everyone claims will be the one that truly challenges World of Warcraft. They’ve all come and gone, and WoW is still reigning supreme, even if it’s in a bit of subscription lull between expansion packs right now. Star Wars: The Old Republic has the strongest license of any WoW competitor yet, and although it’s not going to come along and kill WoW by any stretch, it seems to have the best chance at being a big success alongside it. And while big-name games don’t typically sell out at launch these days, that might just happen with TOR, and it’s reportedly an intentional move by EA.
No, EA isn’t limiting the supply of The Old Republic copies in order to give the illusion of it being more popular than it really is. (Nintendo was accused of this with the Wii, once upon a time.) Instead, Game Informer reports that a rep showing the game at Gamescom revealed plans to limit the game’s supply at launch. The purpose is to avoid server instability, a problem that invariably plagues MMOs following launch when there is a massive influx of players and not enough servers to handle the load.
It plans to do this both at retail and digitally. There is apparently an exact number of copies it believes it can handle; should that number be exceeded, digital sales will be cut off and EA will try to increase its server capacity. The rep didn’t provide a specific timetable for how long the process would take. Odds are, it wouldn’t be an especially long time.
