Star Wars: The Old Republic Racks Up One Million Players

Star Wars: The Old Republic was expected to have a big launch and it appears the game's living up to those expectations. Publisher Electronic Arts announced today that the game already has over one million registered players.

The game officially went live in North America and Europe on December 20th. However, some players were able to play as early as December 13th due to the game's early access period. BioWare granted early access to pre-order customers in the order that they reserved their copy. During this week and a half, the player base has racked up some impressive stats:

• Logged 28 million in-game hours – roughly equivalent to watching all six Star Wars movies, two million times
• Averaged well over five hours a day playing the game
• Created more than 3.8 million characters; 510,000 Jedi Knights and 550,000 Sith Warriors
• Killed more than 2 billion non-player characters in the eight days since Early Game Access began

The strong debut for Old Republic resulted in high queue times for some servers. BioWare announced on Wednesday that a dozen servers were approaching their absolute capacity for players. They're slowly raising population caps over time on these servers; they don't want to do it too quickly, though, because they're hoping to encourage new players to play on less crowded servers.

Old Republic is set thousands of years before the films. The Galactic Republic and Sith Empire are battling for dominance of the galaxy. Players can become Jedi, Sith, bounty hunters and more. Their adventures will take them to several prominent planets in Star Wars lore, including Alderaan and Tatooine.