Originally posted by Betakodo

Originally posted by QSatu
I have my doubts. GW2 seems like a polar opposite of what Chinese like in their games.

The Chinese seem to like Ancient Chinese settings or overly cutesy SD games. I don't know how those SD games survive there, anime styled I'm OK with, but not SD cute everywhere.

Anyways, is there going to be more cash shop crap in a buy to play game with buy to play expansion content? Seriously, they shouldn't have made commander buyable with gold. Or did they do that on purpose so people would buy more gems? I think yeah from the poo poo I've seen commanders spewing in WvW.

I don't think you're really forced to group in Guild Wars 2 for anything but dungeons. WvW yeah you could, but really you can solo a supply camp fine. I think duo is optimal for that.

 TbF I'm pretty sure sure boxed sales do just fine in China depending on the game. Diablo 3 most probably sould a good few million in China alone nd that does have a chinese setting, it really just comes down to the game, If the Chinese feel it's worth the price they'll buy it if they feel it isn't thy won't.

Originally posted by cptndunsel

Many will say "you are not forced to grind - you are pointing to optional content."

 

But lets start a tally list shall we.

1. You want to get a legendary? This is a massive grind along multiple fronts to gather all that is needed.

2. The new Daily Laurel system - a grind if you want the rewards from the laurels.

3. Fractals - a gear grind.

4. Dungeons - each are a token grind for gear.

5. Karma events - karma grind for gear or for the karma needed for a legendary.

6. Crafting high level items - all grind and anet's nerf to loot drops, diminishing returns implementation to fight bots etc. has made this worse. The economy in game is a mess as well with crafted items worth less that the value of the mats due to the fact everyone needs the same stuff and the drop rates suck.

7. PVP or WVW - more grind to get the gear and/or badges of honor.

8. Ever think you want one of the cooler looking weapons that require lodestones? Good luck - the drop rate on these can be less than 1 per hour and when you need 250 ...

 

There is no real end game so anet is making this game a grind fest to keep players from running out of things to do and moving to other games. But - the grindfest is 180% different than how the game was advertised so many are leaving anyway.

 

Its going to be up to anet to figure out how to fix this. I am not encouraged by what I have seen so far. The one new content release - Southsun Cove - was a total fiasco and few players even bother going to this zone due to the lack of content and loot once there.

 TBF there's massive irony right in this post it's actually quite hilarious. There's no real endgame so anet is making this a grindfest. Herp derp. that's precisely what an endgame is a massive grind fest. You can't it go both ways man. You either want it to not be like other mmo's I.E no real endgame or you don't.

Originally posted by Muntz

Originally posted by Normandy7
Guild Wars games have no grind. I'm not sure what kind of game ArenaNet made to be honest. It seems just like another typical theme park gear grind that we already have out there.  Though I will say that anyone who does not have a decent amount of time to put into mmos then they probably shouldn't be playing mmos in the first place. Some people just have too many life priorities to be able to put the time in. You can't always have your cake and eat it too.

Guild Wars had grind it didn't have progression, that is, there was armor grind but the stats didn't increase over what you could get with very little effort. ANet changed this with Guild Wars 2 first by adding legendaries that had slight increases over there counter parts and then acsended gear changed it even more. 

 TBF you clealy did not play Gw1 anywhere near the later half of it's life if you thought it had no grind. Title tracks gave you more powerful skills a lot more powerful, people would often choose not to party with you if you did not have the right title level. These titles were the grindiest shit going. This was all post Nightfall. Before nightfall you'd be correct but not now. GW1 has plenty of grind.

GW2 started with far less grind than gw1  currently has and now it's moved up a bit but it's nowhere near it yet. It's like people seem to have selective memory. How many of you actually did the quests for the torment weapons in NF, I'd guess not many.

It was balanced in pvp, but gw2 is balanced in pvp, the only one you could argue is WvW which is inherently unbalanced, since people would aim for the best armor and max level in wvw anyway, A-Net simply moved that up slightly.

Originally posted by mikahr

Originally posted by Warband

 No Xfire is flawed. Statistics isn't half as simple as your trying to make it out to be. Even a stopped clock is correct twice a day. That doesn't make it accurate. Going into anymore detail would be simply going around in circles,  but even xfire has shown the player base as in number of people actually playing stabilised. No you could say xfire is wrong and player base is falling at an exponential rate, but my question is what are you discuss. This entire thing is biased. Due to who Xfire works people read what they want to read, that's pretty much it.

Except XFire trends have been proven right any time you look at them.

You can theorize all you want, practice proves your theory wrong, plain and simple.

Originally posted by Nadia

Xfire:

WoW in January 2012 had 90K hours played.

Now WoW in January 2013 has 25K hours played.

 

what do you make of the wow discrepancy

where Xfire shows WOW having a 300% drop in played hours since a year ago? 

despite still having 10 million subs?   (as stated November 2012)

mmm, did i mention NOt based on HOURS PLAYED but on INDIVIDUAL USERS LOG ON NUMBER.

Yes i did. Several times by now.

It simply says that same amount of players played heck out more hours/day in 2012 than in 2013.

If 10 players play 8 hours/day for 10 days at one time and then drop to 3 hours/day for 10 days? OMG how does it show such drop!

 Tell me what was the drop on number of players in gw2 in the past 2 months. Because going by xfire gw2 has about 60% of Wow's user base. So what is your point precisely?

Originally posted by mikahr

Originally posted by evilastro

People are still talking about Xfire? Sheesh. If you think Xfire is a valid tool to estimate total populations, then you don't understand statistical bias or random samples.

Furthermore, the first big test of GW2 will obviously be the expansion. Retention of players until then is largely irrelevant due to the B2P model. Although my server is always packed with queues for WvW and people looking for dungeons *shrug*.

When people say "its losing players" and XFIre shows otherwise then XFire is right and they are wrong. When people say "its not losing players" and XFire shows otherwise XFire is right and they are wrong.

And it has been proven in practice, practice beats theory. You can theorise how much you want about it being "wrong" but its proven right every single time.

So yah, XFire is good to discuss.

 No Xfire is flawed. Statistics isn't half as simple as your trying to make it out to be. Even a stopped clock is correct twice a day. That doesn't make it accurate. Going into anymore detail would be simply going around in circles,  but even xfire has shown the player base as in number of people actually playing stabilised. No you could say xfire is wrong and player base is falling at an exponential rate, but my question is what are you discuss. This entire thing is biased. Due to who Xfire works people read what they want to read, that's pretty much it.

Originally posted by Gaia_Hunter

Originally posted by Warband

Originally posted by Yakkin

Originally posted by Warband

Originally posted by Yakkin
"XFire is generally wrong unless it's my game, then it is the epitome of accuracy and everyone who says otherwise is an idiot" - What is really the case.

 Yeah it's flawed unless these people using it believe gw2 has a population equal to 60% of WoWs. Which I'm guessing is the opposite of what they're trying to get across which is that's falling terribly. I still lol that they're using hours played, gw2 has no monethly fee meaning people aren' obligated to play it all the time in comparison to p2p.

I was kind of applying this as a blanket statement towards ALL MMOs.

 Of course it's like VG Chartz, terrible source but people use it anyway when there's no others sources to suit there preference.

I prefer the layoffs sources - seems quite reliable when something is wrong.

 TBF layoffs in business aren't don't neccesarily mean a company is doing badly since a company could be more profitable then ever and still lay people off. (usually because they're hierachy is quite bloatedwith a lot of positions that aren't need so to maxmise profit they lay them off) especially if contract based if they only want them for a specific project or part. Though if there's enough being layed off of the regular workforce then you tell something may be wrong.

If your talking about layed off people blabbing then your probably right.

Originally posted by Yakkin

Originally posted by Warband

Originally posted by Yakkin
"XFire is generally wrong unless it's my game, then it is the epitome of accuracy and everyone who says otherwise is an idiot" - What is really the case.

 Yeah it's flawed unless these people using it believe gw2 has a population equal to 60% of WoWs. Which I'm guessing is the opposite of what they're trying to get across which is that's falling terribly. I still lol that they're using hours played, gw2 has no monethly fee meaning people aren' obligated to play it all the time in comparison to p2p.

I was kind of applying this as a blanket statement towards ALL MMOs.

 Of course it's like VG Chartz, terrible source but people use it anyway when there's no others sources to suit there preference.

Originally posted by Yakkin
"XFire is generally wrong unless it's my game, then it is the epitome of accuracy and everyone who says otherwise is an idiot" - What is really the case.

 Yeah it's flawed unless these people using it believe gw2 has a population equal to 60% of WoWs. Which I'm guessing is the opposite of what they're trying to get across which is that's falling terribly. I still lol that they're using hours played, gw2 has no monethly fee meaning people aren' obligated to play it all the time in comparison to p2p.

If you look at the number of players playing gw2 on xfire you'd notice the number players playing the game hasn't really changed. it's been steady at around 3000 for a while now compared to WoW's 5000. Game must be doing terrible right.

.

Originally posted by DukeDu
They IP block my country on top of that.

 There's a reason for that. Vindictus is quite litterally uses the hosts computers as a server relying on there internet speed. Meaning if you tried to host a game it'd terrible for anyone else trying join in that game. and if you log into some else game you would put in extra strain on there computer affecting the experience for them any anoyone they're with. It's annoying but they're not just randomly blocking you for no reason. It's just a major design issue with the game.

Originally posted by bcbully

Originally posted by Gaia_Hunter

Originally posted by bcbully

Here's what it is.

Anet has found a message for a market.

A lot of boxes have been sold.  

There is still a significant number of people playing. 

 

What I don't understand is why hasn't the stock gone up.

What I don't know is cost of production, how is the cash shop doing. 

 

What I think is that the 5+ year production is more than what most orginally thought. Retention is lower than what was expected by the majority of the mmorpg community.  

 

 

NCSoft isn't only Arenanet.

Arenanet has between 250 and 300 employees now.

On average, over the 5 years of development, lets consider 200 people, earning an average of $75K/year, which is on the high side for a game designer. Some people will earn more than that, but those 200 people aren't all game designers and will earn a lot less.

That is $15M a year or $75M development cost.

Considering the 2M sales far exceeded their expectations, I doubt the budget was over $30-50M.

They recently have sold 3 Millions, half of that from their own site, earning them something like $50. The rest lets assume they make $20 (30%).

1.5M*50= $75M

1.5M*20= $30M

Even if the budget was $75M, they already made a $30M. If the budget was $30M then they made $75M.

Then you have gems.

Lets assume around 10% of the players buy around $10/month in gems. That would be 300K players, but let make it 100K players (or 3% of all boxes sales).

100K*($10*4 months)= Another $4M.

I'll dig some NCSoft reports to check the amount of money Anet was draining.

Brb.

 

The thing is their 3rd qt report showed 48 million total. Analyst predicted that 1st qt 2013 will be much less due to sales being up front. This is what promted the the 50% loss of stock value. 

 It fell by 10%. And Q4 will very telling of this whole thing, though like I said games companies tend to post they're profts in the following quarter, for a host of reasons, right now for NcSoft  investors will be keenly looking at the Q4 results.

Originally posted by Slappy1

Originally posted by Warband

Originally posted by fiontar

Originally posted by Nadia

Originally posted by Yamota

I am saying that 3 million sold units for a triple A B2P RPG is nothing special. Many B2P RPGs sold more than that and D3 was just one example, so 3 million is perhaps above average for a triple A title.

Hell even subscriber based RPGs like AoC and SW:TOR sold over a million units, so 3 million for a B2P one is nothing special.

context from wiki -- this is all time sales -- not just sales for 5 months

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_games

 

GW2 is still coming to China

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/08/30/guild-wars-2-is-heading-to-china/

 

i could be wrong but i think its realistic that GW2 will sell at least 10 million over a 3 year period

-- if it does, that places GW2 in top 10 PC games of all time for best sellers

 

This is an important point to make. 3 Million units is the total to date. I think there were around 2 million units sold by the end of September. An additional milion units in the 4th quarter is very solid for ongoing MMO sales.

However, this also provides some important information on the success of the B2P business model. GW2 produced $110US revenue in Q4. Unit Sales directly from Arenanet may provide $60/unit revenue, but with the wholesale prices for units sold through other retailers, the average revenue per unti sold would be less than $60/unit.

The wholesale price is probably closer to $36/unit. It's not unreasonable to guesstimate that the average revenue per unit is somewhere around $45. That would mean ~$65 million in revenue was produced via gem sales. That's pretty healthy revenue. Roughly the equivalent of the revenue produced by a subscription based game with a paying player base of over 1.4 million players! (If all 3 million GW2 accounts were being actively played, that would mean roughly half the revenue per account as a subscription based game, but few AAA MMOs released in recent years can boast of 700,000 active, paying subscribers).

These numbers look even better, relative to the competition, when you consider how many of the AAA P2P titles released in recent years have transitioned to F2P models, in some cases less than a year after the initial release.

GW2 will continue to build the total player base via box sales over time. Among that playerbase, people will come and go as far as active play time goes, but the expanding pool should continue to provide enough active, gem purchasing players to maintain and even grow the revenue stream over time.

NcSoft get $48 dollars out of the $60.

http://www.gamebreaker.tv/mmorpg/guild0-wars-2-thanksgiving-in-tyria/

Guessing this is great news for Ncsoft since Gw2 and Blade & Souls which last  heard seemed to be doing well in Korea were they're two main drivers of revenue.

 

 

Didn't the game have around $45-$46 mill in revenues at the end of 3rd quarter 2012?At that point there were 2 mill plus box sales.End of 3rd quarter was Sept 30 and 2 mill was announced as sold on Sept 13th.

Not saying they did bad,but $48 of $60 would be probably $18 plus dollar's over what companies actually get.Pretty sure I saw the game on sale online for $40 over the holidays,it was a short sale but still.I don't see a store taking an $8 loss even for a day or 2.

$48 a box just doesn't come close to the financial's I read.

 That's the same with most video game companies they don't tend to make money or rather showed the money earned in the quarterly earnings that month. E.g Take-Two routines has drops in revenue during quarters when they realise games during those quarters. Partially to marketing etc without taking into account revnue from the game itself. As stated in the link It was expected they mention they're be earnings from Q4 onwards not Q3. Which is par for course. Also the $48 came from NcSoft.

Originally posted by fiontar

Originally posted by Nadia

Originally posted by Yamota

I am saying that 3 million sold units for a triple A B2P RPG is nothing special. Many B2P RPGs sold more than that and D3 was just one example, so 3 million is perhaps above average for a triple A title.

Hell even subscriber based RPGs like AoC and SW:TOR sold over a million units, so 3 million for a B2P one is nothing special.

context from wiki -- this is all time sales -- not just sales for 5 months

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_video_games

 

GW2 is still coming to China

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/08/30/guild-wars-2-is-heading-to-china/

 

i could be wrong but i think its realistic that GW2 will sell at least 10 million over a 3 year period

-- if it does, that places GW2 in top 10 PC games of all time for best sellers

 

This is an important point to make. 3 Million units is the total to date. I think there were around 2 million units sold by the end of September. An additional milion units in the 4th quarter is very solid for ongoing MMO sales.

However, this also provides some important information on the success of the B2P business model. GW2 produced $110US revenue in Q4. Unit Sales directly from Arenanet may provide $60/unit revenue, but with the wholesale prices for units sold through other retailers, the average revenue per unti sold would be less than $60/unit.

The wholesale price is probably closer to $36/unit. It's not unreasonable to guesstimate that the average revenue per unit is somewhere around $45. That would mean ~$65 million in revenue was produced via gem sales. That's pretty healthy revenue. Roughly the equivalent of the revenue produced by a subscription based game with a paying player base of over 1.4 million players! (If all 3 million GW2 accounts were being actively played, that would mean roughly half the revenue per account as a subscription based game, but few AAA MMOs released in recent years can boast of 700,000 active, paying subscribers).

These numbers look even better, relative to the competition, when you consider how many of the AAA P2P titles released in recent years have transitioned to F2P models, in some cases less than a year after the initial release.

GW2 will continue to build the total player base via box sales over time. Among that playerbase, people will come and go as far as active play time goes, but the expanding pool should continue to provide enough active, gem purchasing players to maintain and even grow the revenue stream over time.

NcSoft get $48 dollars out of the $60.

http://www.gamebreaker.tv/mmorpg/guild0-wars-2-thanksgiving-in-tyria/

Guessing this is great news for Ncsoft since Gw2 and Blade & Souls which last  heard seemed to be doing well in Korea were they're two main drivers of revenue.

Originally posted by maskedweasel

Originally posted by Warband

Originally posted by maskedweasel

No you missed my point a company is about maximising profit a conversion to f2p is not some cheap thing you do just for the sake of it, it actually costs money. and is a massive risk (there's no guarantee that going f2p will drastically increase revenue) That means the previous revenue modle was unsustainable, companies don't give a shit if something was profitale before hand if it was a bad oportunity cost and is drastically on the decline. The means the box sales weren't working out for them at all. Bacause the profit from the amount made from the game wasn't even and worst still was greatly decreasing. Success of products like these aren't determined by a products launch but by long term achievements.

 

It doesn't mean that at all.  For example LOTRO never HAD to go F2P,  but they did to Maximize Profits.   The game not hitting projections doesn't mean the game isn't profitable...  and in fact, switching to F2P is exactly the point of trying to get more money out of an existing project.  Hence, why games go that route.  Subscription projections might still be low, but again, who is more profitable,  someone who sells 7M after 10 years with diminishing sales returns,  or someone that keeps 200K subscribers during that time?

 

If youre answer is.. "I don't know"  then you're on the right track.  Because you don't.... neither do I.. thats the point.

Yes, yes it does, compare how long each game had been out Lotro only went f2p after seeing how well dungeons and dragons went. Bioware NEVER had any intention of going f2p any time soon even despite knowing how popular it was. This was made abundantly clear. The fact they scrambled to do so within a year means worse case scenario occured.

And what does worst case scenario indicate?  They couldn't keep 1 Million subscribers?  They couldn't keep 200K subscribers?    And "yes it does" doesn't answer which is more profitable between the two revenue models either...

 

Unless we have exact sales figures.. we don't know.  We still don't know how much SWTOR actually cost, nor GW2.  We don't know the final sales totals on SWTOR prior to F2P.. and we have no idea how many subscribers were retained..  

 

Its like how people have said  WAR and AoC failed.... its been the general consensus around here for years.... and yet AoC not only is still open, but as recently as a year or so ago they released information stating they nearly doubled profits with their F2P model.  

 

Unless numbers are exact, the truth is.. we have no clue how well SWTOR or GW2 is really doing.

We've had statistcs saying about 10% of a player base for f2p actually buys anything 10%. Now compare that to say a monthly subscription where everyone pays $15 as well as a box fee. Then compare this to costs of maintaining the game etc. If the sub base showed any sign of being stable and decent they would NOT have gone f2p. At the very least not this quickly. Shareholders called them out on this shit and they were lambasted.

We know how well GW2 is doing to a reasonable degree right now as the main thing that really matters to A-Net and NcSoft is that the is still selling, ultimately that is the bottom line for GW2's success. if only 10k were concurrently play but the game continued to sell 1 million every 4 months A-Net would not give a single shit. Of course it probably won't do that but you get my point.

Originally posted by maskedweasel

Originally posted by Warband

Originally posted by maskedweasel

Umm no... I'm not sure if you can tell the differene but f2p effectively kills box sales as the game is free, logic would dictate, that the sales would have had to have been bad and a rapid decline in subscriptions in order for them to do so.  Also no numbers stated by the company essentially in this situation so heavily implies that they were bad that it could not be so obvious without them telling by how much. GW2 is not F2P, it doesn't even have a free trial you still require to buy the box which is actually fairly expensive in comparison to most pc games. One has box sale revenue the other does not (or not very much). One has a barrier to playing the game another does not.

You clearly missed the point...  SWTOR had plenty of box sales prior to going F2P, plus subscriptions, and now they are F2P.    Games that go F2P aren't necessarily unsuccessful, and we have no idea of how successful SWTOR has or hasn't been.  Thats not "conjecture"  or "common sense"  thats fact.   No numbers stated by the company means very little, as in many cases NCSOFT never revels subscriber numbers, and much less costs on development... nor will GW2 reveal the amount of active players.  

 

Point being, we can sit here and pretend like we know what we're talking about, but my question stands,  profitability is what matters on a project to determine its success...  the point I made earlier,  even with GW1s amazing "17 billion boxxes zold!" (the amount doesn't matter)  they decrease in revenue per box sold.  In comparison to a subscription model,  or purchase - per - content model, that isn't necessarily the case.

No you missed my point a company is about maximising profit a conversion to f2p is not some cheap thing you do just for the sake of it, it actually costs money. and is a massive risk (there's no guarantee that going f2p will drastically increase revenue) That means the previous revenue modle was unsustainable, companies don't give a shit if something was profitale before hand if it was a bad oportunity cost and is drastically on the decline. The means the box sales weren't working out for them at all. Bacause the profit from the amount made from the game wasn't even and worst still was greatly decreasing. Success of products like these aren't determined by a products launch but by long term achievements.

 

It doesn't mean that at all.  For example LOTRO never HAD to go F2P,  but they did to Maximize Profits.   The game not hitting projections doesn't mean the game isn't profitable...  and in fact, switching to F2P is exactly the point of trying to get more money out of an existing project.  Hence, why games go that route.  Subscription projections might still be low, but again, who is more profitable,  someone who sells 7M after 10 years with diminishing sales returns,  or someone that keeps 200K subscribers during that time?

 

If youre answer is.. "I don't know"  then you're on the right track.  Because you don't.... neither do I.. thats the point.

Yes, yes it does, compare how long each game had been out Lotro only went f2p after seeing how well dungeons and dragons went. Bioware NEVER had any intention of going f2p any time soon even despite knowing how popular it was. This was made abundantly clear. The fact they scrambled to do so within a year means worse case scenario occured.

Originally posted by maskedweasel

Originally posted by Gaia_Hunter

Originally posted by maskedweasel

Originally posted by Warband

Originally posted by maskedweasel

Originally posted by Warband

Originally posted by Teilo

Originally posted by Warband

Guild Wars 2 has sold over 3 million copies since its August

I have to admit, my initial reaction was.

"is that all?"

How many copies did SWTOR sell again? And that was sub game ...that still isn't doing that well. :-/

Swtor went f2p within a year. It's box sales and sub after after were obviously terrible. This game managed to sell and extra million well after launch in about 3-4 months. That's the distinct difference. One game continued to sell well after launch and probably will continue to sell and the other didn't.. Also considering swtor had star wars IP and the Bioware name recognition near it's peak as well as the massive marketing campaign it's not really comparable, it was also the largest budget mmo in existence and the strongest combined brand power to grace an mmo..

GW2 was however leagues better recieved than swtor was and post launch sales infer that, Considering the most a pc game has sold in that period of time is 6 million (released in far more territories than gw2 was and the biggest in pc game history), there's no way you can infer it so far as mediocre or bad.

"Obviously terrible" is conjecture, as well as subscription numbers total, as nobody really has that information.  In comparison... GW2 went "F2P" after the initial box sale - hence its payment model.  Alternatively, we have no idea how the switch to F2P actually impacts SWTORs revenue... or their current playerbase.  This isn't an apples to apples situation... 

 

Many games have gone F2P, yet they are still active and generate revenue... how much revenue?  Who knows,  but "obviously" profitable for them to still be running.

Umm no... I'm not sure if you can tell the differene but f2p effectively kills box sales as the game is free, logic would dictate, that the sales would have had to have been bad and a rapid decline in subscriptions in order for them to do so.  Also no numbers stated by the company essentially in this situation so heavily implies that they were bad that it could not be so obvious without them telling by how much. GW2 is not F2P, it doesn't even have a free trial you still require to buy the box which is actually fairly expensive in comparison to most pc games. One has box sale revenue the other does not (or not very much). One has a barrier to playing the game another does not.

You clearly missed the point...  SWTOR had plenty of box sales prior to going F2P, plus subscriptions, and now they are F2P.    Games that go F2P aren't necessarily unsuccessful, and we have no idea of how successful SWTOR has or hasn't been.  Thats not "conjecture"  or "common sense"  thats fact.   No numbers stated by the company means very little, as in many cases NCSOFT never revels subscriber numbers, and much less costs on development... nor will GW2 reveal the amount of active players.  

 

Point being, we can sit here and pretend like we know what we're talking about, but my question stands,  profitability is what matters on a project to determine its success...  the point I made earlier,  even with GW1s amazing "17 billion boxxes zold!" (the amount doesn't matter)  they decrease in revenue per box sold.  In comparison to a subscription model,  or purchase - per - content model, that isn't necessarily the case.

GW2 also has gems.

And then you have Arenanet has been growing since GW1.

Bioware started to layoff people in April 2012.

 

GW2 does have gems, but again, we don't know how that plays out in comparison, when you look at revenue.

EA lays off tons of people in different studios everywhere,   NCSoft does just as much, which Arenanet is a part of.  NCSoft will choose what studio needs to layoff who as they have done in previous years. 

GW2 is by far there most popular western game if anything they'll want to grow A-net due to gw2's success. That doesn't neccsarily mean hiring people or keeping people if streamlining the hierachy will increase profits. but I'd say A-net is fairly safe right now. I likely meeting any expectation NcSoft had for the game.

Originally posted by maskedweasel

Originally posted by Warband

Originally posted by maskedweasel

Originally posted by Warband

Originally posted by Teilo

Originally posted by Warband

Guild Wars 2 has sold over 3 million copies since its August

I have to admit, my initial reaction was.

"is that all?"

How many copies did SWTOR sell again? And that was sub game ...that still isn't doing that well. :-/

Swtor went f2p within a year. It's box sales and sub after after were obviously terrible. This game managed to sell and extra million well after launch in about 3-4 months. That's the distinct difference. One game continued to sell well after launch and probably will continue to sell and the other didn't.. Also considering swtor had star wars IP and the Bioware name recognition near it's peak as well as the massive marketing campaign it's not really comparable, it was also the largest budget mmo in existence and the strongest combined brand power to grace an mmo..

GW2 was however leagues better recieved than swtor was and post launch sales infer that, Considering the most a pc game has sold in that period of time is 6 million (released in far more territories than gw2 was and the biggest in pc game history), there's no way you can infer it so far as mediocre or bad.

"Obviously terrible" is conjecture, as well as subscription numbers total, as nobody really has that information.  In comparison... GW2 went "F2P" after the initial box sale - hence its payment model.  Alternatively, we have no idea how the switch to F2P actually impacts SWTORs revenue... or their current playerbase.  This isn't an apples to apples situation... 

 

Many games have gone F2P, yet they are still active and generate revenue... how much revenue?  Who knows,  but "obviously" profitable for them to still be running.

Umm no... I'm not sure if you can tell the differene but f2p effectively kills box sales as the game is free, logic would dictate, that the sales would have had to have been bad and a rapid decline in subscriptions in order for them to do so.  Also no numbers stated by the company essentially in this situation so heavily implies that they were bad that it could not be so obvious without them telling by how much. GW2 is not F2P, it doesn't even have a free trial you still require to buy the box which is actually fairly expensive in comparison to most pc games. One has box sale revenue the other does not (or not very much). One has a barrier to playing the game another does not.

You clearly missed the point...  SWTOR had plenty of box sales prior to going F2P, plus subscriptions, and now they are F2P.    Games that go F2P aren't necessarily unsuccessful, and we have no idea of how successful SWTOR has or hasn't been.  Thats not "conjecture"  or "common sense"  thats fact.   No numbers stated by the company means very little, as in many cases NCSOFT never revels subscriber numbers, and much less costs on development... nor will GW2 reveal the amount of active players.  

 

Point being, we can sit here and pretend like we know what we're talking about, but my question stands,  profitability is what matters on a project to determine its success...  the point I made earlier,  even with GW1s amazing "17 billion boxxes zold!" (the amount doesn't matter)  they decrease in revenue per box sold.  In comparison to a subscription model,  or purchase - per - content model, that isn't necessarily the case.

No you missed my point a company is about maximising profit a conversion to f2p is not some cheap thing you do just for the sake of it, it actually costs money. and is a massive risk (there's no guarantee that going f2p will drastically increase revenue) That means the previous revenue modle was unsustainable, companies don't give a shit if something was profitale before hand if it was a bad oportunity cost and is drastically on the decline. The means the box sales weren't working out for them at all. Bacause the profit from the amount made from the game wasn't even and worst still was greatly decreasing. Success of products like these aren't determined by a products launch but by long term achievements.