Star Wars The Old Republic Gets 1.5 Million Registrants For Beta Testing

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If you were wondering if anything, anything at all, could ever really challenge World of Warcraft’s supremacy as top dog of the MMO kingdom, well, you might want to take a look at Star Wars: The Old Republic. News that just hit a little while ago says that they’ve already got 1.5 million registered users…for the beta test.

Here’s the kicker: no one, not even the beta testers, actually knows when the beta test start date is. They just signed up for beta testing, having absolutely no idea if the world as a whole will still exist, but they’ve got sufficient faith (or maybe just sufficient desire to actually take this puppy for a spin) that they’re signing up, ready to go whenever BioWare is.

I don’t mind telling you that that’s a pretty big deal. Some have projected that World of Warcraft currently has around 11 million users, so for the beta version of Star Wars: The Old Republic to be pulling around a tenth of that is no mean feat. And word is that only those who were really active in the original Star Wars: The Old Republic community got to be involved…so assuming for a moment that those numbers are accurate (and there’s really no reason to believe they’re not), and assuming they didn’t sign up the whole community, that means there’s a whole lot more than 1.5 million folks who want in on this action when it finally emerges.

That’s going to make for a very interesting little showdown between World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Maybe the two can coexist–it’s not so hard to believe that a medieval, almost Tolkienoid fantasy can work cheek and jowl alongside a science fiction epic with space opera tendencies. It’ll be interesting to see how it all boils down once Star Wars: The Old Republic isn’t just a topic of conversation and instead an actual product available for purchase, but we’ll likely have a while to wait yet before that happens.