Re: Guild Wars is SO MUCH BETTER than World of Warcraft

Mean_Chlorine wrote:
> That said, though, and while GW is already a financial success, I
wonder if their financial model will really be all that long-lived.
WoW's subscription fees alone rake in more profit _every month_ than
GW has made over it's entire lifetime. This in *addition* to WoW
costing as much to buy as GW, and outselling GW by a factor of almost
5.

You'd have to look a timeframes as well. WoW's been up for almost 15 months now, and it was released worldwide. GW, OTOH, has only been up for about 9 months, and was initial only released into the European and US markets (new translations and server farms are coming online; Japan should already be launched).

In addition, ArenaNet makes it's money on the addons, and that's what they bank on. They've made GW ultra-efficient at bandwidth usage, and so even if they have a million people playing all at once, the costs remain low. Only allowing 4 characters keeps storage costs down for accounts, and keeping people interested in the game and buying the addons keeps the whole she-bang moving (In Factions, they're introducing city-control, a la WoW's RPPVP servers and Contested Territory).



The take-home message is, I think, that a) people will happily pay full price for a subscription game, and b) will happily pay a subscription fee of $10-15 per month.

The conclusion of that is that selling a game full price and then
charging subscription is better than selling a game full price and NOT
charging subscription.

Only if you look at profit. People buy and play the game because their friends play the game. Then, they're roped into the subscription fees to continue playing the game. Taking a break isn't an option, unless you'd like to risk losing your characters (which in WoW, are sizable time investments). Either continue to pay, or leave the game. Kinda sounds like playing a slot machine. Pay your money to keep playing, and maybe you'll get something special, but whatever you do, it's going to take a long time and a lot of money.


The one thing which could change that equation would be if GW turned
out to have more staying-power due to the twice-yearly updates &
streaming updates of engine and graphics than WoW, but somehow I have
a hard time seeing that.

But it's happening. There was the Sorrow's Furnace update a long time ago, which added a lot of end-game content, and Factions is coming up, and like I said, were not quite 3/4's of the way through the first year.

Plus Blizzard is raking in so much cash they
could develop two new WoW's per year without breaking a sweat.

And yet they don't seem to have enough to expand their servers to get rid of the queueing problem...

Or the lag...

Or develop the character models beyond 100 polygons...

Or make interesting initial quests...

TheSmokingGnu
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