What would be the fail condition for GW2?

If all their doing is selling boxes to make a profit then its going to be very hard to make a fail condition for the game because you cant see a "sub reduction" or a revenue loss easily.

If after a year, the game only has 10,000 active players its not going matter at all because the boxes have already been sold right?.

Exception to this is the cash shop, But that relies on people actually buying to from there to make a profit anyway.

A decent point, but you're just gonna get flak with that TSW profile pic of yours.

I think most people already know the condition the game is in from the HUGE amount of vids on the internet, that is, if they didn't already do a BWE or two. It's kinda hard to be completely aloof of a game's state-of-being in this day and age.

Could we please for a change stop discussing if/when/how/why a certain game has/might/will fail? Those threads are silly, pointless and usually end in nothing but rubbish anyway.

If we take SWTOR as an example, going from 100 servers to 10 isn't an indication of a game "doing well"

GW2 would only fail when it switched to F2P like Aion, AoC and soon TSW.

O wait! GW2 does not charge sub fee.

Originally posted by Nitth

What would be the fail condition for GW2?

If all their doing is selling boxes to make a profit then its going to be very hard to make a fail condition for the game because you cant see a "sub reduction" or a revenue loss easily.

If after a year, the game only has 10,000 active players its not going matter at all because the boxes have already been sold right?.

Exception to this is the cash shop, But that relies on people actually buying to from there to make a profit anyway.

Fail condition would be the same as it was in GW1--box sales.

If GW1's timeline is any indication, I would say that the an expansion will hit around one year after GW2 goes live. If a large chunk of accounts purchase the expansion, than the game is successful, if not, well hopefully the cash shop will be profitable enough as a fallback.

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Originally posted by Saydien
Could we please for a change stop discussing if/when/how/why a certain game has/might/will fail? Those threads are silly, pointless and usually end in nothing but rubbish anyway.

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The only reason i bring it up is because 2 things interest me:

1. What constitutes a failure money or population?
2. Its a very interesting model that seems very well engineered to succeed.

I actually think the OP brings up something that's quite relevant. The fact that there are no subscritpions makes all of the "Fail" threads about GW2 completely irrelevant. It's nice to see someone else with the intelligence to realise it.

Personally the only way I can see of measuring GW2's success is in the number of sales. We know GW sold somewhere around 7 million units in total. That includes expansions. I suppose only time will tell if GW2 can sell a similar number of units, in which case I'd call it a success.

Originally posted by seridan

If we take SWTOR as an example, going from 100 servers to 10 isn't an indication of a game "doing well"

SWTOR wasn't doing well before they launched, but just like RTW with APB, developers fail to see obvious game breaking flaws and launch straight into a self imploding disaster.

I think it's different for everybody when/how/why a game "fails". Good luck even coming up with a definition of that word.

An example, LOTRO was called failed many times over the years, yet it's still there with a healthy amount of servers, so in my book it didn't fail, I enjoyed playing it for 5 years and always had people to group up / raid with.

Well, the whole thing is that subbed games simply don't have people "pop back in for a little bit, every now and then". If millions of people buy it, and all of them get bored after the first month - like any other MMO out there - they can still pop in occasionally and repopulate the game in a trickle.

Something Tera could really use right now.

You can't really judge F2P games based off of current server populations but if they don't garnish the desired income the company was expecting, than yes, that would be an indication. However, that kind of information will never see the light of day, unless you're an ex employee and have a bone to pick with said company <cough> SWTOR <cough> EA Louse <cough>.

Originally posted by Nitth

 

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Originally posted by Saydien
Could we please for a change stop discussing if/when/how/why a certain game has/might/will fail? Those threads are silly, pointless and usually end in nothing but rubbish anyway.

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The only reason i bring it up is because 2 things interest me:

1. What constitutes a failure money or population?
2. Its a very interesting model that seems very well engineered to succeed.

Both. 

Population will lend profit through the cash shop, and the purchasing of expantions.  They are direclty tied. 

Furthermore if population dwindles man thats going to stink.  Because the entire game is based around a lot of people playing together.  Even if they dont talk to each other.  So if very little plays its going to have severe burn on the population.  GW2 might be the last game you want to play all by yourself.  So you might quit  if you are having too especially with this one.  

Further impacting the population.  Further impacting profits. 

Just like any mmo, the more people you have playing the better off you are.  There's no sub fee to be sure, but profit is made by players playing non the less. 

Personally, as of right now, Im hardly worried about it. 

It's not going to do any worse than Guild Wars 1 did, I think for it to "fail" it would have to fall short of GW1.

I know over the years I played Guild Wars VERY casually but every 6-9 months I would pop back on it for a month because it was there and I didn't need to subscribe to enjoy playing the game again.

Guild Wars 1 was a stepping stone towards GW2, it wasn't a full MMO but it made us start thinking "do we really need to pay a subscription for an MMO?" 

Guild Wars 2 will be judged on it's box sales and then future expansion sales, the best thing about the model is that someone that hasn't played for 9 months doesn't need to set up some recurring monthly bill in order to play the new expansion when it comes out. 

GW2 will retain more players than a regular MMO, it will have its hardcore crowd that play it as a main game and then it will have others that dip in and out whenever they feel like it, even if they only play once every 6 months they are still retained players, these are players than another MMO with a subscription would lose after month 1.

Not enough people to play with....so if they have their server system set up well this shouldn't be a problem.

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Originally posted by SlickShoes
It's not going to do any worse than Guild Wars 1 did, I think for it to "fail" it would have to fall short of GW1.

I know over the years I played Guild Wars VERY casually but every 6-9 months I would pop back on it for a month because it was there and I didn't need to subscribe to enjoy playing the game again.

Guild Wars 1 was a stepping stone towards GW2, it wasn't a full MMO but it made us start thinking "do we really need to pay a subscription for an MMO?" 

Guild Wars 2 will be judged on it's box sales and then future expansion sales, the best thing about the model is that someone that hasn't played for 9 months doesn't need to set up some recurring monthly bill in order to play the new expansion when it comes out. 

GW2 will retain more players than a regular MMO, it will have its hardcore crowd that play it as a main game and then it will have others that dip in and out whenever they feel like it, even if they only play once every 6 months they are still retained players, these are players than another MMO with a subscription would lose after month 1.

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But wouldn't taht lead to population dips, and therefore a loss in cash shop revenue?
Idk, i never played gw1, dont know how they handled that aspect.

I'm not going to go by a financial fail condition, except for if they sell under 1 million accounts within the first 6 months. Keep in mind that they probably aren't going to sell as many boxes as other games because of the whole digital pre-purchase thing, which aren't really boxes. I say 1 million accounts because that is how many beta sign-ups were placed within the few days they were open. If they don't pass that number I think it shows that not as many people were interested as they had thought.

The main fail condition I'm going to go by is the condition that never fails to show failure. There has to be enough people to play with. This one will be very hard for GW2 to fail at with its PvE side, because everybody can guest over to a higher populated server if they need to. However, for WvW it might be a bit harder to maintain a high number of players because of how WvW teams work. If GW2 were to fail by population I'd say that WvW would show it.

Originally posted by Nitth

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But wouldn't taht lead to population dips, and therefore a loss in cash shop revenue?
Idk, i never played gw1, dont know how they handled that aspect.

GW1 has been active for like 5 years since the last expansion was released and is still alive, only with the Cash Shop. Population dips aren't hurting GW1/GW2 as much as subscription based games.

Everything in GW2 smells like epic win...

Like the original GW1,i´ll have it installed in all my PCs over the years & play it whenever i feel like...

enough win for me.

dodge a bite underwater is priceless

GW1 survived mainly because people could jump between American and European servers. A few years ago, the population dipped in the Euro servers so everyone just made the American servers the new main base and voila, the population was back again. If something similar happens again to GW2, then everyone will just move to the most populated servers without Anet even asking them to.