The Old Republic is EA’s new MMO hope, with their previously launched Warhammer game sitting with only “a couple hundred thousand subscribers to date”. EA has high expectations for the game, previously noting that they need 1 million subscribers just to break even. At the Janney Capital Markets’ 2010 Consumer Conference, EA CFO Eric Brown said that The Old Republic was “the largest R&D project EA has ever undertaken in terms of total dollars that we expect to spend bringing the title to market.”

EA and BioWare are moving forward at a pace like current MMO market leader Blizzard, stating the game is “done when it’s done.” Brown noted, “We’re not expecting it to ship in fiscal 2010, nor have we given a specific ship date thereafter. We’re intentionally being nonspecific on the ship date.”

EA is pulling out all the stops to make Old Republic as successful as possible. Star Wars is an immense IP, one of the largest made into an MMO since Turbine’s Lord of the Rings Online. Brown noted that most of the conference’s attendees were familiar with the property. “We think it has very broad appeal,” he said.

“In the past, for MMOs, the type of fiction that has resonated most broadly is fiction based on swords and knights and sorcery, et cetera,” the CFO explained. “Star Wars is analogous to that — instead of the swords, you have the lightsabers; instead of the knights you have the Jedi — we think it’s a fiction that does very well, we think it’s a fiction that spans the decades.”

EA retains full confidence in BioWare’s ability to deliver, noting that the studio’s Mass Effect 2 was “the highest-quality title EA ever released,” with a Metacritic score of 96. “BioWare is one of the highest-rated studios in terms of quality overall,” Brown adds. Bioware’s MMO magnum opus will represent EA’s “principal investment and commitment vis a vis the MMO space.”