I doubt. I doubt the truth of this statement, and I doubt your right to make it as anything other than a personal opinion. :)

So, Sony spent time and money on redesigning the game out of pure random whimsy or is it part of a huge conspiracy that began with the fake moon landing? Old school SWG was dead. Subs were being cancelled left and right. The redesign was Sony seeing the writing on the wall and trying to find a way to stop the bleeding and regain interest.

Not that it matters much, SWG is awful both pre and post NGE. It's a confusing game and has poor quality. I last gave it a try in late 2008 and it still didn't fix basic animation problems that came with the launch product. With that kind of attention to detail and care about the product, all NGE was able to accomplish was avoiding the total destruction of the game.

But there is no doubt, without NGE, SWG would have shut down years ago.

@neurotic - do you believe in the tooth fairy? Santa Clause?

SWG was loosing about 10K subscribers a month before the CU and NGE. It's not hard to figure out why and what other new game that was out there was sucking up all these new players.

@laughingtarget - Changing a game entirely in mid-game life was proven to be an even worse idea than making WoW clones (like Warhammer and Conan). No one knows for sure how many subscribers they lost but I'm guessing they went from about 250K to less than 100K in a few months after NGE. Please do not work anywhere near the gaming industry. Failure to acknowledge a PR nightmare that dwarfes any others in the gaming industry is just bad.

Actually, you shouldn't be anywhere near a game
company in any decision making process. The game was dying. If it wasn't, a redesign would not have been deemed necessary. It wasn't near peak when NGE launched as you claim. Maintaining status quo out of fear for something worse than what is already happening is how businesses die. Pre-NGE clearly didn't work. You may have liked it, but the market didn't. You aren't the market, you are just one person.

All it really shows is that launch is the critical period. SWG lost it's customer base because of the shoddy product it launched with. The game was broken at its very core. SWG was destined to fail. NGE couldn't have worked because of the memories that most players
had of the pre-NGE content was horrible. Returning to nostalgia land won't fix that. There's a reason why the emulators aren't being flooded with players, few players really liked that you remember fondly.

Good post Torak, but the Pre-CU-or-bust crowd has their fingers in their ears.

I would argue that 300k for a game in 2003 wasn't pathetic at all, it was extremely good. You need to remember that its competition was UO, EQ, AC1, Camelot, and AO. That's it. I'm not sure any of those games surpassed 300k but EQ. The MMO market -- and its potential -- has utterly burgeoned since then. It's hardly fair to compare 2003 to a post-WoW market.

But yes, anyone who played in those days knows that the population started taking a nose-dive about a year into the game, right before JTL actually. It needed SOMETHING to save it. The game launched unfinished and didn't really get enough love, and then when they tried to give it "love" via the NGE, they failed, royally, because they were trying to make their game something its REMAINING playerbase didn't want. No excuses for those kinds of blunders.

Of course the modern game doesn't really resemble NGE very much at all, and shares much more with pre-NGE. But again, the pre-CU crowd has its fingers in their ears, and they don't want to hear about all the good stuff going into SWG. They won't listen to anything that contradicts their woebegone fantasy about how SWG did them wrong.

And yeah, the EMU is never going anywhere -- they're infested with drama.

@LaughingTarget

They didn't change the game because they were losing subscribers, they changed the game because they thought they could gain as many as WoW had. Pull players from WoW w/ the SW name.

Unfortunately they did a horrible job of it and ruined the game. You just cant take a game that was designed around a play-style and completely change the style hoping the game will conform. It doesn't work that way.

Sony FAILED horribly, period. There's a reason SWG is considered the quintessential MMO blunder.

Look at this chart
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html

As you can see, subscriptions were holdnig firm at 300,000 until the Combat Upgrade (CU) in the beginning 2005, where it then fell 50,000 immediatly.

Then look at late in 2005 where it fell dramatically by 150,000, to 100,000 (from 300,000 before the changes) until 2007. They lost 2/3 of their player base! As of now I'd be surprised if they even had 50,000 customers left; even the biggest SW nerds in the world must have given up by now.

MASSIVE FAILURE

@LaughingTarget @Arrow-Pop

Just to clarify my last comment, it was NGE that sent the population running for the hills.

CU was considered a pain but people tried to adjust. NGE was the one that tried to "WoWize" it and made the game plain bad.

Read this blog post if you want to know why it was the devs fault
http://brokentoys.org/2008/06/12/good-apollo-dear-god-the-internet-it-burns-iv-srsly-dude/