Was the game fun? Were the characters interesting? Was gameplay innovative? And if Star Wars was taken out of the equation entirely, you can bet hundreds of millions wouldn't have been thrown at this project in the first place. Development should have acted like Star Wars wasn't even a factor.
Too much faith was placed in the Star Wars brand. We've always wanted to be a Jedi, Sith or bounty hunter in a massive Star Wars universe, but if once we get there we're tasked with a frustrating amount of fetch quests across extremely boring areas, we're not going to enjoy ourselves, nor pay $15 a month for the privilege. Star Wars has yielded many phenomenal titles in the past, a few from Bioware themselves, but here? The game itself wasn't as fun as it needed to be. The Star Wars universe may be an interesting one, but there needs to be a substantive, innovative, and engrossing game set there as well. Unfortunately, you can't rely solely on a brand to get people excited for, and more importantly addicted to, your game. If there was any brand on earth that could make for a massively popular MMO, it was Star Wars, and as such it was surely worthy of the flood of cash and man hours devoted to it.
It's very obvious that the reason so much money and time was sunk into SWTOR was because of the unending popularity of Star Wars.
