When I wrote the previous post on this blog about Star Wars: The Old Republic’s declining population, some folk agreed with gusto. Others were shocked — and I fully expected that to happen. Yet others made the point that I was just talking off the top of my head and wasn’t working off “real figures”. These people had more than a trace of hope in their comments that maybe, somehow, in the absence of figures, what I was saying was totally wrong.

Then, by total coincidence, just a couple of days later came real figures, suggesting that the game has indeed lost almost 25% of its subscriptions since March. Yes, you might need to read that figure twice, like I did. Almost a quarter of the game’s population, gone since March. Now, if someone had told me a quarter had been lost since launch (back in December), I would have been shocked. So to hear a quarter since March… MARCH?!? I was stunned.

Now, much like the last post, I don’t say any of this to cackle with glee because Star Wars was just some kind of passing fad for me and SWTOR can now go and join Star Trek Online, Age of Conan and other games that went the way of the dodo in short order. Indeed, it’s perhaps worth reminding people reading this blog, that I spent three years of my life, pre-SWTOR, creating and running Beskar, fully expecting SWTOR to last years for myself and my members.

So where do we go from here?

I think for anyone who follows this blog and/or the goings-on at our server, Sanctum of the Exalted, the message is obvious: Business As Usual. I think most guilds, on most servers, are in a similar position to us right now, ie: the game hasn’t caught people’s imaginations; numbers have plummeted (and there’s just no getting around putting that any other way as much as I’d like to); and, accordingly, guilds have taken a hit on their memberships. But it’s only a hit.

You see, Beskar still has extraordinarily passionate gamers who are so into SWTOR, I’m sure they’d bleed “story” if you cut them. So for them, this is a very confusing time as they sit there at their PCs, doing their quests, or doing their PvP, or roleplaying, or whatever, and they are totally and utterly enjoying themselves. Yet they look left and right and there are angry people, people quitting, people really unsatisfied with the game. You can see their confusion.

So, as I asked a moment ago, where do we go from here? I think Beskar, like many guilds out there, will go forward looking for new members. Maybe what we’re seeing now is the “true size” of the game and, by association, its guilds? And when I say “true size”, make no mistake SWTOR still has a very, very large base of subscriptions. Now, whether that base has hit bottom, or whether there are more to go, the jury is still out and, for that, we all wait on the edge of our seats.