I think it comes down to expectation from their developers and the monetary model.

If GW2 was a subscription game, that 2M boxes sold would mean little if the game had only retained 500.000 the first month and diminishing the second and onwards.

Or to put it backwards, if SW:TOR didn't have a subscription, with the 2M boxes sold, it would be considered a massive success, regardless of the amount of people currently playing it.

Basically people think that retention is very relevant in a subsciption based game when measuring success or failure, but irrelevant in a game that is based solely on box sales and a cash shop.

Originally posted by bcbully

From a financial stand point it probably isn't, depending on how much profit they were looking to make. It would be interesting to see what last quarter's report projected.

 

From a personal stand point it tops my list of flops, if I go by play time.. This is the shortest time I've played an mmo. 

Even shorter than your TSW play time?

Considering you were hyping TSW and trolling GW2 threads before they both launched, surely TSW is a bigger flop for you than GW2.

I don't quite understand, why would you call it a flop?

- Lots of boxes sold - check

- Great reviews and reception - check

- Doing well on xfire - check

Add to that no subscription + Anet adding ladders/ranking soon.

What were you expecting?

It depends on how you define "flop". If you assumed it to beat Wow in players worldwide the first month and keep all players for many years then yes.

But remember that ANETs goal was 3 million copies sold this year. More than that makes the game no flop no matter what you personally think. It sold 2 million copies in 2 weeks and is still selling pretty well, in fact most of my game stores had it sold out almost the entire month.

So I think it will get the estimated sales it had and calling something that made the goal a flop is just stupid.

Then again, it might fail to reach the goal, it is still hard to say.

But you shouldnt really compare a B2P MMO with a P2P or F2P game. They have different goals. P2P just want to keep you playing forever and therefore add more and more grind to keep you going. F2P focus on selling as much items as they can, they dont really care how long you play, just how much stuff you buy. B2P want you to buy the boxes and expansions. If you play a month or or a year doesnt really matter as long as you get the next expansion and play for a while after it is out.

I played GW1 on and off for 5 years, bought all expansions.I assume I will do the same with GW2. Of course I will alternate it with other games and take breaks, probably some longer but I will buy the expansions and I have really fun when I play.

I also played EQ2 for 5 years but there I often felt forced to log in, both because I payed for it and to keep my gear updated instead of just logging in whgen I enjoyed it.

But, no. I dont think GW2 flopped. But we wont know anything for sure until january.

Originally posted by mxbx
The fact is, this is just another in a long line of flops that's failing to live up to the hype.  Proof please, facts, not personal opinions

Does anyone seriously deny that ArenaNet is spiking their sales numbers?  Again, show facts, proof where you got that information

And let's not forget: it failed as F2P right out of the gate, Facts? Figures? Sale figures?

where ToR and many other games managed to run P2P for at least a few months. that worked out great, didn't it?

How can the ArenaNet fanbois unbiased OP? call ToR a failure and GW2 a success when ToR managed to hold subs for months? You see a succesful game when you notice a $300M budget, years of hyping, saying you go head to head with Blizzard, get negative response from the community after release + you do server closures/mergers starting within 5 months after release!

Again, a disgruntled player, creating a thread asking a question yet is too eager to let his personal opinion run wild on him and make the decision for you.

This time a player from SWTOR bashing at a MMO that has absolutely nothing to do with GW2, different genre, absolute nobody (just a paying customer frustrated by seeing less & less population) making conclusions on made-up facts.

It's not Arenanet's fault that Swtor is dying a horrible death.You should whine about Bioware, not Arenanet because they did it right.

Originally posted by Muke

Originally posted by mxbx
The fact is, this is just another in a long line of flops that's failing to live up to the hype.  Proof please, facts, not personal opinions

Does anyone seriously deny that ArenaNet is spiking their sales numbers?  Again, show facts, proof where you got that information

And let's not forget: it failed as F2P right out of the gate, Facts? Figures? Sale figures?

where ToR and many other games managed to run P2P for at least a few months. that worked out great, didn't it?

How can the ArenaNet fanbois unbiased OP? call ToR a failure and GW2 a success when ToR managed to hold subs for months? You see a succesful game when you notice a $300M budget, years of hyping, saying you go head to head with Blizzard, get negative response from the community after release + you do server closures/mergers starting within 5 months after release!

Again, a disgruntled player, creating a thread asking a question yet is too eager to let his personal opinion run wild on him and make the decision for you.

This time a player from SWTOR bashing at a MMO that has absolutely nothing to do with GW2, different genre, absolute nobody (just a paying customer frustrated by seeing less & less population) making conclusions on made-up facts.

It's not Arenanet's fault that Swtor is dying a horrible death.You should whine about Bioware, not Arenanet because they did it right.

Well, it do make sense that sales have spiked as he say. You usually sell more of a game the first week than any other week. But GW2 dont need to keep those numbers up, it just need to sell a few thousand games every week to do great.

But you are also wrong, there have never been any proof of TOR costing $300M, someone just trolled it a long time ago and people assume it for a fact ever since. Fact is that it costed more than GTA IV to make ($120M), how much more is something EA keeps secret but it is likely half of what the rumor say.

Originally posted by CallsignVega
Just because GW2 sold two million copies doesn't mean it's a good game. People go in droves to see the worst movies ever made...

Yes, but that has what to do with the topic? 

Originally posted by Loke666

Originally posted by Muke

Originally posted by mxbx
The fact is, this is just another in a long line of flops that's failing to live up to the hype.  Proof please, facts, not personal opinions

Does anyone seriously deny that ArenaNet is spiking their sales numbers?  Again, show facts, proof where you got that information

And let's not forget: it failed as F2P right out of the gate, Facts? Figures? Sale figures?

where ToR and many other games managed to run P2P for at least a few months. that worked out great, didn't it?

How can the ArenaNet fanbois unbiased OP? call ToR a failure and GW2 a success when ToR managed to hold subs for months? You see a succesful game when you notice a $300M budget, years of hyping, saying you go head to head with Blizzard, get negative response from the community after release + you do server closures/mergers starting within 5 months after release!

Again, a disgruntled player, creating a thread asking a question yet is too eager to let his personal opinion run wild on him and make the decision for you.

This time a player from SWTOR bashing at a MMO that has absolutely nothing to do with GW2, different genre, absolute nobody (just a paying customer frustrated by seeing less & less population) making conclusions on made-up facts.

It's not Arenanet's fault that Swtor is dying a horrible death.You should whine about Bioware, not Arenanet because they did it right.

Well, it do make sense that sales have spiked as he say. You usually sell more of a game the first week than any other week. But GW2 dont need to keep those numbers up, it just need to sell a few thousand games every week to do great.

But you are also wrong, there have never been any proof of TOR costing $300M, someone just trolled it a long time ago and people assume it for a fact ever since. Fact is that it costed more than GTA IV to make ($120M), how much more is something EA keeps secret but it is likely half of what the rumor say.

I stand corrected about that 300M then.

Still:

I would like to see facts that gw2 is already dying.

GW2 is just released, I see full servers, whenever I get swtor mails I see 'servers closing/merging, original owners jumping ship', I log in, empty servers, lacking content when playing....

I like swtor personally, so I would like to know where the OP got his facts from, because obviously he's some sort of medium.

Originally posted by Xasapis

I think it comes down to expectation from their developers and the monetary model.

If GW2 was a subscription game, that 2M boxes sold would mean little if the game had only retained 500.000 the first month and diminishing the second and onwards.

Or to put it backwards, if SW:TOR didn't have a subscription, with the 2M boxes sold, it would be considered a massive success, regardless of the amount of people currently playing it.

 

Basically people think that retention is very relevant in a subsciption based game when measuring success or failure, but irrelevant in a game that is based solely on box sales and a cash shop.

No.

SW:TOR $150-300M budget - So to just recoup investment of $150M they would need to sell 3M copies and that would be with them grabbing all the money from a sale. So more like 5 or 6 million sales.

GW2: $50M tops and I doubt NCSoft would spend even that. 2M sales for Anet generated over $100M with a significant portion of direct digital sales.

Originally posted by Gaia_Hunter

Originally posted by Xasapis

I think it comes down to expectation from their developers and the monetary model.

If GW2 was a subscription game, that 2M boxes sold would mean little if the game had only retained 500.000 the first month and diminishing the second and onwards.

Or to put it backwards, if SW:TOR didn't have a subscription, with the 2M boxes sold, it would be considered a massive success, regardless of the amount of people currently playing it.

 

Basically people think that retention is very relevant in a subsciption based game when measuring success or failure, but irrelevant in a game that is based solely on box sales and a cash shop.

No.

SW:TOR $150-300M budget - So to just recoup investment of $150M they would need to sell 3M copies and that would be with them grabbing all the money from a sale. So more like 5 or 6 million sales.

GW2: $50M tops and I doubt NCSoft would spend even that. 2M sales for Anet generated over $100M with a significant portion of direct digital sales.

You are arguing numbers, I'm arguing mentality. Assuming numbers were equal (which will never be), don't you think that the subscription model will always be considered a flop due to retention, regardless of units sold? Even if the developers recoup their original investment with just the original box price?

GW2 just isn't a flop. They certainly sold enough copies to make profit.

Originally posted by Shorun

GW2 just isn't a flop. They certainly sold enough copies to make profit.

I dont think thats what the OP is saying. It flopped because it didnt live up the its SUPER DUPER MMO OF THE FUTURE expectations..

SWTOR made a profit...but I think everyone here would agree it was the biggest failure/let down in MMO history.

If you are asking about whether it was a flop in terms of living up to expectations of the masses as a whole, I cannot say, because the masses are too diverse in their expectations for me to tell something like that.

If you are asking about whether it was a flop for those who expected the second coming, then I would answer "maybe, depending on how satisfied they were."

If you are asking about whether it flopped for people who hated/disliked the game, then it's an obvious yes/most likely, although once again, it depends on how much they expected it to fail.

If you are asking me whether it's a flop, I would say no. I enjoyed the game for what it is, and thus it is not a flop in my eyes.

They probably turned some profit... but just turning profit isn't always enough, it is how much profit you turn.  If you invest 1million dollars and make 1 dollar profit in 20 years, it obviously wasn't a good investment. 

GW2 has sold well so far, similar to swtor, as you would expect from big name mmos with big hype in this day and age, (wow blew the genre wide open so much more people are playing mmorpgs these days), but did they sell as well as they'd hoped, we don't know cause we don't work at ncsoft... (get over it, ncsoft is the parent company that completely owns gw2 and could do whatever they want with it.), will it retain enough players to generate good money from the cash shop?  We don't know yet... but the game doesn't have enough depth to keep a large amount of people dumping money into micro-transactions... hell even LoL has a more efficient game design for that, and LoL is a moba, and gw2 is an mmorpg, mmorpgs are meant to have depth... at least they used to be, before the degradation of mainstream culture into the facebook twitter era of mindlessness. 

I will say this... if you will argue that gw2 is not a flop because of sales and b2p model... than on that criteria diablo3 is probably the best game ever made.  Shattered sales records, blizz rakes in tons of money from rmah transactions.... etc etc

But diablo3 is the ultimate proof that even a game with little substance and a horrendous retention rate and plethora of issues, can sell the best.  Doesn't mean it was a good game...

Originally posted by mxbx
The fact is, this is just another in a long line of flops that's failing to live up to the hype.  Does anyone seriously deny that ArenaNet is spiking their sales numbers?  And let's not forget: it failed as F2P right out of the gate, where ToR and many other games managed to run P2P for at least a few months.  How can the ArenaNet fanbois call ToR a failure and GW2 a success when ToR managed to hold subs for months? 

 How is that a fact?

How did it fail as F2P right out the gate when it's not free to play? Any game you have to buy and not pay a sub for is F2P in your opinion? TOR is a financial failure, nobody in his right mind is trying to even deny it anymore. If you have information on how GW2 is in the same boat, please let us now instead of just pulling "facts" out of you know where.