I told you the sun would finally explode!

“I told you the sun would finally explode” – Paul  Barnett on the No Prisoners No Mercy Show

It never ceases to amaze me the number of people who leap out of the blogosphere’s woodwork screaming at unsuspecting passers-by that whatever particular game is popular with an all too fickle market that it is doomed to fail…and do so at the first hint of any anything they don’t consider optimal performance.  More than once we have been told by Ardwulf  that Star Wars the Old Republic (SWTOR) is doomed to fail with the odd presumption that in order for it to be a success it must be a “wow killer”.   Remarkably, in a feat that would have turned Nostradamus green  with envy, the first time Ardwulf predicted the ultimate demise of SWTOR was nearly a year before the game hit the shelves,  and without, presumably, so much as access to Bioware’s profit and loss statements.

If a constantly volatile stock market that reacts more to newspaper headlines than quarterly reports sees a slight dip in a game publishers stock, somehow they are once again doomed to failure.  Nearly a year ago Ardwulf assured us all about his predictions of doom for SWTOR, stating “This is not my opinion. This is math.”

But numbers don’t lie…or do they?

Certainly numbers lie, especially when you don’t have all of them.  The practice of making sure they do is called “cooking the books”.  The fact that numbers can easily be made to lie, and do so quite well, is why forensic accountants exist in the first place.  In fact I spend a good portion of my time reviewing “the numbers” that auditors use to see if they are lying in the first place.  The simple fact of the matter is that without access to Bioware’s financial statements including balance sheets, profit and loss/statement of account, and cash flow statements it is not possible to tell if something will or will not be a success.  Yet here we are, less than a month into full release of SWTOR not even three weeks into the first quarter of the year and somehow sectors of the blogosphere seem to feel they  know more about the success of SWTOR than Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello.

Mind you I could care less whether or not Ardwulf’s ass is a wow killer or not, the real danger is that some sector of the gaming public would take as fact what is nothing more than conjecture.  So before you listen to an “armchair ceo” (whoever they might be) assure you any game will be a failure before they have even seen a quarterly report, it is probably best to tell them to stick to predicting that the sun will explode. After all, at least that way they will eventually be correct.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather