Star Wars: The Old Republic testers play for nine million hours in one weekend

These guys are always ready for combat.

Bioware recently threw open the gates of The Old Republic to anyone who wanted to try it out. The stress test initially put tremendous strain on the servers, but testers still managed to put in 12 hours of play each on average across the weekend. 725,000 testers logged in over Thanksgiving weekend, clocking up more than nine million hours between them.

The stats were announced by Bioware at the annual Global Media and Communications Conference, attended by Gamespot . There EA chief financial officer Eric Brown said that two million volunteers had signed up to test TOR for the open beta period. Yesterday Bioware shut down the ongoing beta as well to prepare for launch on December 20.

It looks as though launch day will attract some staggering numbers. Hopefully the servers won't catch fire too much. If you're getting into The Old Republic and fancy joining a guild, we might have just the thing for you. If you're playing in the US, the Coconut Monkeys are still recruiting for the Sith. For Europeans, the PC Gamer Mint Imperials is pretty full, but our light side guild, The Revel Alliance still has some space. Join us and feel the true force of the Dark Side. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

Tom Senior

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.