Is GW business model really unique?

Don't confuse business model with overall figures.

A MMOG with 15$ monthly fee and another with 1$ monthly fee have exactly the same business model, despite the fact that the former is 15 times more expensive than the latter.

The two hypotetical software houses both perform their cost and market analisys and decide that they can sell for 15$ and 1$ respectively, and this is financially convenient.
But their business approaches are exactly the same.

But to explain that the two are the same, you would have to make up for the (approximate) 220$ over two years, plus the fun (we will agree that this is impossible to quantify), minus the grind, plus the special events, minus the addiction, et caetera.

You are defending your theory here that both models are the same, because of the inability to "punish" (double-quote) Anet. But one can oppose so many unquantifiable aspects of the games (if WoW is not your point of reference, let me know what is) that your theory only apply to you and people who have the same view (no disrespect, but I think it's a minority of people).

It seems you want "accountability" and I believe that we already have it, but not in the "immediate" and "financial timeframe" way you're thinking about. If people want to "punish" Anet, they won't buy the BMP or GW2. (hell, some people even come to GWG to troll for revenge, some people scam and polute the world, and I hope we agree that it's not a way to balance Anet's business model to accomodate one's views!)

Guild War's business model? Bah! I had this same idea back in '83 at the age of 8! But people laughed. They said, "There's no such things as intrawebs, son." I went to lunch defeated.

Really all the game needs is a feedback component to the game client.
Say on the title screen. Just a multiple choice about the latest update and another one for features one would like to see.

apparently that is what fansites like this are for (in part).

G.Grey has also a role to play in this, so we are told.

Off course not everyone reads let alone posts, but it can be supposed that a general "temperature" can be taken.

Fansites fail at this because not everyone goes there and voices their opinion. There is huge amount of people who are silent because they are content and similary huge amount of people which simply give up on the game and stop playing without fanfares.

Thats feedback anet is missing, and no amount of Gaile FTE's can help with that.

Plus, most of fan sites have certain atmosphere which kills some feedback because its no-go with its community, and where participants wont voice their opinions because they would loose "street cred" there.

Multiple choice questionare in game is very accessible for masses. But ofc, listening to masses never helps.

and in tv you dont have people trying to get you to join them on "a quick run", which usually turns into an all day event. I think it's the social interaction that keeps me hooked to games like gw

New business model to spice up their sales:

Make noob islands ( Shing Jea, Istan and presearing ) "F2p" (Free2Play) as in Runescape, although Pay2Play in runescape is a subscription system. People can do everything on those islands, but can't do other stuff...I bet this will attract alot of new players, and it wouldn't impact current players that much...they don't need to be in those areas only for some HM or making a new character off course. PvP would be limited to the low level arenas as well.

Interesting idea, but what about server costs?

I think the 10 hour trial keys are a better idea at attracting new customers.

Let's not weaken the argument with bad math (it's strong enough using good math ). WoW can be had for $13 a month if you buy it in 6 month blocks. At launch in November 2004, the cheapest you could get it new was $45, the Burning Crusade $30 at launch, and each with an inclusive month. Since we're comparing to GW, we'll only go with the since April 2005 amount of time, so that's 31 months.

WoW: $45 + $30 + (29 x $13) = $452

Using wildly discounted prices for GW is not a good argument if you're trying to convey 2 years+ of play time, particularly since you aren't going to find all four games for $80 and the BMP does not count in any way, shape, or form considering it could have been had for free (those who volunteered to pay for it are artificially invoking a cost where there was none, but that's a whole slew of other threads). By taking advantage of deals, I nabbed all four games recently for $115 sans BMP, and that's as good a price as I could come up with, but it's still not a fair comparison - other than GW:EN, all these games are older and not fetching the full price someone would have shelled out had they been playing since April 2005. If we're fair, we'll assume that you probably paid about the same $45 the $50 MSRP WoW cost at its launch for each of the three chapters and $40 for GW:EN and that comes to...

GW: $45 + $45 + $45 + $40 = $175

That's only 258% better deal compared to your 320% figure, but I think it still makes the argument in spite Abnaxus refusal to view reality with anything other than delusional mindset

Thanks for the complement. After further thought and search (I was in Oxford Street, London, this afternoon and checked the price, GW and WoW games are cheaper here, and amazon.co.uk has for example NF collector at £10/20$, same price as Wow and burning crusade; so the comparison is very dependent on where you get your numbers), I discovered that the benefit in buying GW against WoW can range from 200% to 500%, depending on where you get your soft/subscription from.

I had further thought about this topic today and it seems to me that the whole business model Anet proposed us is to share the business risk of their project with customers. They grant us the right to "free play once the game is bought", but there's a form of support that is a bit (I insist, it seems to me to be "a bit" and not more, nor less, because GWG's whining and flaming threads are rather limited in scope), some updates are not done due to resource constraints (e.g., problems of cliping, bugs/exploits?), and the issue of banning botters/gold-sellers is quite complex.

Overall, IMO ANet's business model is outstanding. First of all, it enables us, players, to choose not to be tied to p2p and big "mega corporations" (Blizzard and Activisition have recently merge...). Secondly, though you only paid 4 times over 2.5 years, and you got:
- 4 games, further extended with HM;
- 2 special extensions (SF, BMP);
- 59 special events (source: gwiki) of which at least 14 are major special events (halloween wintersday, dragon festival, etc.) which is in average 2 events a month!;
- new products via the online store (unlock packs).
Of course all of these financial benefits are balanced by the fact that the "top tier" of the game (l33t, uber-players) is very difficult to attain due to grinding, and the PvE/PvP divide is sometimes difficult to manage. Of course you may end up on the wrong side of the banning stick (if you're unlucky to buy dupped armbraces or reported by the small part of the GW population that enjoys annoying people).
Thirdly, community support via fan forums and gwikis (which could be extended with the PvP side of the game, but I guess it would be the occasion for certain people to flame this thread). This latter aspect is akin to the Open Source support for software, where users contribute for free to the success of the product. GWiki was so good that Anet created one.
Fourthly, you can even get some of the money back is you play PvP (I'm surprised that the few PvE extremists haven't started to QQ about that, but it'll come) with $100,000 tournament.
(we could also expand our view of the business model by introducing the minipet offers in game magazines)

Honestly, I don't see how you can draw a parellel between Anet's business model and Blizzard's one. There are surely commonalities, but they're very far apart. Anet's business model suits the needs of casual players and hardcore gamer that are ready to sacrifice uber-l33t+grinding for a few hundred $s over 2.5 years (and probably a bit of game addiction too).

Another very good point raised before: since you're not tied to the game due to the absence of monthly fees, you're actually in the strong position here, because you can leave (ok, that's not so easy given how awesome the game is overall) without financial impact, almost. While a Wow account can be worth several thousand $s (someone mentioned a recent story about that on GWG) based on a few hundreds directly paid by the gamer, a GW account is not worth so much but it is directly tied to the amount of efforts/time put into it. Though you will probably feel that this amount of time associated to a GW account creates an emotional link, it is much less that the equivalent amount of time AND the additional money that a WoW-er spent.

LOL

Well actually I've spent double that amount because of 2 accounts, adding some skill unlock packs and other little stuff probably my "better deal" could be evaluated in some 30%, without mentioning the Prophecies account I've made as gift to my brother.

Money is not the problem here, for me at least.

I don't play GW because it's cheap.
I play it because I like the gameplay, the basic ideas of the game concept, the graphics and so on.

I wouldn't buy WoW even if it was pay once, because WoW is an ugly game, I don't like it.

Instead I would have accepted a monthly fee for GW if they had proposed such business model.
Then in case A.net had failed in something, both technical or marketing, I could have had the possibility to "punish" them canceling my subscription.


My "delusional mindset" is essentially referred to their marketing and customer relationship.
The fact itself that I have 2 accounts, comes from long time ago August/September 2005, when me and several other players asked for the possibility to have additional slots to play all 6 core classes.

The answer from A.net representatives was the infamous "we currently have no plans about this" a sentence that we had to hear too many times later on.
So me and many other customers bought a second account.
Then in February 2006 (six months later) Factions came and "magically" character slots were available.

Well, I could have decided to use only one account deleting and rerolling characters. Instead I decided to continue with the double account.
Why? Because it wasn't such a huge economical sacrifice, and I (naively) thought it was my personal contribution to support the game, which I considered the best in the market.

Later on, several players in my situation asked A.net for a system to merge accounts (this mainly because with NF and heroes it could have been useful to use all skill unlocked from both accounts instead of doing unlocking on each account), and this was addressed with the usual "we currently have no plans blah blah ...".

The BMP was the cherry on the pie.

They have always failed in properly addressing customers' needs.
The game is technically otstanding, their marketing and customer relationships are horrible.
I remember that once in a thread about graphical bugs on armors I dared to say that maybe A.net is not willing to address those bugs because they are only focused on GW2 and don't care if players may lose interest in GW1 which they've already got money from.
The answer coming from Ms. G. Gray in person was "please take a break, do something else, create a new character, buy a new armor" LOL. (and of course the usual "we have no plans ...").


I cannot accept a bad marketing just because someone says "hey, GW is cheap, what do you want from them?".

I'm not used to think this way.

GW offers - and will hopefully offer - an excellent game experience, which I'm willing to pay for, supported by a very bad marketing.
A supplier (like A.net is) presents itself to customers with both its technical department and marketing department.
The two aspects cannot be separated when expressing an overall evaluation of the customer satisfaction.


That's why I came to the conclusion that I would feel more confortable with a subscription model.

Totally agree, and in addition: additional purchases are not required to continue playing the original product.

On this point, Guild Wars wins hands down. If you decide to stop paying your monthly fee to Activision/Blizzard, then you can no longer play the product you paid for.

The problem is, you're in the minority. I don't think Guild Wars would survive with a monthly fee. The free to play aspect is it's biggest draw IMO.

We paid for that.

How do you think A.net marketing decides the price?
They consider the development cost of "4 games, HM, 2 special extensions, 59 events" and so on in their budget, as well as maintenance costs (bug fixes, servers, possible further extensions).
Then they make a price that covers those costs and gives a revenue.

That's how every normal business company work.
Nothing is given for free, everything is planned in advance, even special offers, and everything has a budget.
Whatever they offer, they can do only if they have a budget that covers the development costs.

I would be fine with GW as a subscription system too. But it not.

You feel like a sucker, ne? Anet screwed you over, so you believe, because things don't go your way.

Go ahead and "punish" Anet and stop supporting them. Stop buying their games.
In fact, why dont you "punish" the forums and stop posting.

Be honest and then compare this situation to having 2 WoW accounts and offering WoW to your brother. The % gain is the same, but the current amount spared is twice! (and your brother would have to pay a lot more)

But you've dismissed this point, for yourself at least, by saying next:

I suspected at one point that your view was biased by your personal situation and (no offense) I think you've shown that here: you lost money because of this particular aspect and you'd want to punish (notice the word this time WITHOUT double-quotes) Anet. If the same situation occured in WoW, you'd have lost 12 months (Factions was released exactly 12 months after Prophecies, not 6 months!) of subscription. How is that for accountability?

Once more, be honest and responsible and accept the consequences of your decision: it was not a financial sacrifice, you did supported the game and you could play with lots of characters as you wanted to (why you'd want that is beyond me, but I'll accept it's your right!).

Anet was totally honest with you, but you didn't like that their business model didn't fit your interests. I can understand that you're upset, but not that now you create wrong theories to basically explain "I can't punish Anet for what they did to me". You should instead realise that you didn't realise that your actions would lead to this situation (I mean, after all, you can't merge 2 accounts, is it like not being able to play the game?) and you possibly did this to yourself.

You used the exact words. For me too it was the cherry on the EotN pie, what a brilliant thing they did!

You meant to say: "They have always failed in properly addressing MY needs and those of the people that I know that thought the same thing"

I'm pretty sure you distorted her words (I'm sure we can find them, I'll leave you to do this). I've been on a few threads where people QQed about minor graphical glitches or that minor little bug, transforming them into much bigger things (subjectivity FTL). As if people were no longer able to play the game and no longer have fun!

Technically, Anet is the game creator and NCSoft is the supplier.

And I guess that by the end of this discussion, you'll realise you're part of a very small minority. Think different, think GW .

Right, but you're missing the big picture: You don't have to pay for anything beyond one core game (Prophecy, Factions, or Nightfall).

Anet gives you a choice of what to buy, subscriber MMORPGS force you to pay $$ each month. And is WoW really that better of a game for it?

Abanaxus wants the power to cancel his account. He can't do that to GW.

No matter how pissed he gets, GW will always be there. I think thats what irritates him.

Abanaxus: "Screw this shit, im leaving"
Anet: "Um...ok. No problem. We have your money. Bai bai~"
Abanaxus: "Grrr...aren't you even sorry?! Won't you try to gain me back?"
Anet: "Um...you can leave, but we'll always welcome you back. Its up to you."

You're absolutely right on Anet's side. But on my side, I remember vividly when I bought the first GW (after a 10h trial) that I was only buying the game and nothing else. And the price was right only for the game. So for me it's free. So if we "map" your view onto my situation, it gets even better for me: by buying GW, I actually bought a lot more than I thought!

And a more technical level, I realised after NF (2nd game I bought) that Anet's game was taking this to a great level. These events (whether you call them free or not it does not change a thing, not one thing) were actually an ideal way for me to play the game, casually during the week when I have free/spare time, then a little bit more (but nothing mad, I still have a life ) during the week-end.

Oh, and you answered to one point of my answer. Please feel free to answer to the rest! We're not here to score points, there's no winner or loser, I'm not attacking you and don't feel attacked by you. But if we start discussing going into a spiral of debates on these "minor" points (it's all relative, I know), we're not going to stop.

I don't think your theory is right, not at all. I believe that you want to punish Anet for a few things that happened to you (and other people, but not that much).

Further thoughts on this point: Anet do have our money, but they're not keeping it to themselves (well they have salaries and they deserve them IMHO!), they're always pushing to the limits of what they can. The BMP is awesome. I'm entirely convinced that they're putting all they can in GW2, while still trying to make Gw1 live (and I think most players are happy about GW1, only those that did everything, from NM to HM, that maxed KOABD and finf no worthy opponents in PvP complain on GWG which probably is no more than 10% of the GW population anyway).

Anet is not stealing our money, especially 2.5 years after they released Prophecies. I know that some people that bought the 3 campaigns didn't buy EotN, and that's probably a mix of accountability and also the fact that for most casual players, the 3 campaigns still offer a lot to do. But as Gaile said recently, sales are steady and Anet has no problem. There are some rightfully questionable aspects of the marketing strategy (minipets, BMP) but overall this is much better than anything we could get. If not, we wouldn't be here.

My borther and I worked this math out some time ago. Although price should not be the main factor in playing an MMO because they are so different.

Consider the following for each business model. You purchase every expansion that comes out, you purchase every monthly fee that comes out and you are hopelesly additiced to the game and play as often as possible:

World of Warcraft (or any subscription base)

Base Program Costs $40 with 1 month free
monthly fee is $15, for a total of $165 per year

WoW then costs a total of $205 per year assuming they come out with an expansion every year.

Guild Wars

Program costs $100 (2 per year)
NO monthly fee

Guild Wars then costs $100 per year.

Wow is $8.75 per month more expensive than Guild Wars. The question you need to ask yourself is: Is the quality difference between the two games worthy of $8.75? Is there a quality difference?

you make your choice from there.

I've actually spent only 40 bucks more on WoW than I have in Guild Wars : ( I even played WoW a month earlier.

Could you explain how so? How long did you play? Did you pay your subscription each month? And so on.

On my previous calculations, I realised that they're all false because I didn't take into account that to make a valid comparison you have to take the price when the games were released, and not now (because if you buy everyhint now, you only have to pay one month of subscription for WoW ). That may reduce the %gain, but not change its direction. GW is cheaper than Wow. And if you add the no-addiction (it's all emotive, not tied to your bank account), but subtract the few problematic situations, GW is a winner through its business model IMHO.

With subscriptions rate, a player seems to be "obligated" to spend time on the game so we can feel our money's worth. There is also the idea that if you stop paying, you cant access the game. So what happens to all the time and money you spent in past? Subscription models says, not our problem.

With GW, this sense of "obligation" to play is greatly eased. If we get bored or ragequit for something anet did, we can just stop playing. Good thing is, if one decides to play again after a month or a year, your toon is still there and can play again ANYTIME with no hassle at all. If you come back after a year, you even get bday gift.

What I like about GW model is not really the financial issues, but the responsible gaming habit it encourages. It is not an essential as like paying monthly for electricity and water. GW model reminds us what GW is: a game.

GW model has its priority in the right direction.

Two problems with that: Anet only released two products in a year once, in 2006 the year of Factions and Nightfall.

2005 was just Guild Wars. 2007 was just GWEN.

"Irritated" is wrong, "cancel account" is wrong.

I'm not discussing about ragequitting because of skill nerf and stuff like that.
I'm discussing about commercial issues, about a commercial relationship between a buyer and a vendor.
And about the fundamentals of our commercial relationship with A.net/NC.

I'm an A.net customer, and not a one-time customer.
I, and like me many others here on this forum, have a continuative commercial relationship with A.net/NC.
We're not like someone who stops at a fuel station on the motorway in the middle of nowhere, buys some oil and hamburgers, and then will never come there for years.

Despite this, the current business model excludes the basic possibility to use the economic power that every continuative customer should have.

In a pay-to-use, if you stop paying for the fee this is a damage for the suppliers.
They can accept this damage, consider it not important, and then lose forever relationship with their customer, or try to do some action to recover.


In GW business model, things are worse than what you said.
If you stop playing, they can only be happy because you don't use their bandwith and server resources.
It's actually an economical advantage for them.

And what's the problem for them for the future, what's the problem if "maybe" someone will not buy something from them after 6 months, or GW2 after 2 years?!?!
LOL 2 years, how can they give importance to the fact that "maybe" they will have some kind of economical damage after 2 years?

They would have added a newer and better product to continue the franchise seeded by the original first release. Simple as that. You don't sit on your laurels, no matter how successful you are. Its always the next big thing. You continue to maintain business with customers you gained through the initial product with merchandise, added items, etc in the meantime between big releases.

Its like...TCG games and booster pack sets. It never ends as long as theres interest, because there will always be more and more product. At the the same time, each new release differentiates itself with new unique cards, but at the same time is fully compatible with all previous cards. This allows backwards as well a forwards collections of cards. Then theres plushies, a cartoon, toys, comics, etc thats built on characters and such from the franchise.

Thats how you build a profitable brand.

I think you answered your own questions...

Many of us are continuative users. If we collectively stop buying Anet products, then Anet will notice.

It forces Anet to make the best products they can, and to update them when problems arise. While everyone can find something to complain about, I don't think many here will claim they are not worth the price.

GW = Proph x2 ($90, no extra char slots at the time), Factions ($50), Nightfall C. Edition ($70), GW:EN ($40), GOTY Upgrade ($5) = $255

WoW = WoW Account ($30), Burning Crusade ($30), 3rd Billing Plan x 3 ($77.99 every 6 months = $234) = $294

In terms of GW:EN, I'm not too sure. But the BMP evens it out (but it shouldn't have to in the first place.)

Just me talking, though.

Just the cost of buying the game alone and the amount of people that have actually brought it would support the game itself I reckon.

I think they make more than enough money from the other games they develop. The fact they don't sit there day in day out updating this, adding that, tweaking this, patching that (to the extent of subscribed MMOs anyway) allows for them to make a game like this free to play online at minimal cost to the company, making up that cost from the millions of subscriptions they have from other games.

Quite simply put, Guild Wars compared to other MMOs, due to the nature of the game, is alot easier to run and maintain than your standard traditional MMO game. The benefits of this? Less cost to run and maintain.

Over two to three years you will still be paying more for WoW than you will be for Guild Wars due to the subscription cost of WoW.

I actually considereed that, and IMO, GWEN only seems less value compared to other Guild Wars products.

If you just take GWEN and compare it to another generic $40 game, than to me, it's worth it. (not that it's a fair comparison, but...)

A bunch of semantics, nothing more. You're post is way too long. Maybe there was some decent argument in the bulk of it that I couldn't make myself read, but I doubt it. You're last line says it all. You're clueless--you seem to have no idea how important the lack of a subscription has been to the success of GW. Its s good game, but you wouldn't even be playing it now if it was subscription based becasue it would've failed a few months after prophecies was released.

P.S.: continuative?

Let's stop at this particular and exact point of your exposé. The money you gave was not given under coercion, no one forced you to do it and you knew what you were doing at this time, even though you're sort-of implying that you didn't know at that time what would come (and this would be wrongfully tied to the argument that "everything that is released after that is part of the package", this is commercially and legally void).

Your "economic power" was to not buy the subsequent games. And you'd want more from a no-monthly-fee MMO? If so, you're the one that is to blame in all this, your idea to introduce monthly-fee to artificially have this "power" (double-quote intended) is uterly ridiculous.

Just be realistic for a moment: if you so much want this power, go to WoW; if you don't like WoW, try other alternatives such as Tabula Rasa (and there are much more comming, I heard of Age of Conan and so many others). Because GW with monthly-fee will NEVER happen, not in this world, there's no business model (in the comprehensive sense, as you highlighted before) behind it. Gw's business model is great for its community, we all cope with the aspects that so much annoy you.

Don't you see the fallacy you're writing here? They've created the no-monthly-fee so that we don't get addicted, which means that their bandwidth will not be full, so unless you convince everyone to stop playing GW, you won't change a thing on their side: they have the money with which they're paying the server companies. If they have to pay them less, it's all benefit to them, isnt' it?

You seem to be operating under the delusion that the "immediate" feedback of a subscription system is actually any faster at indicating something developers can do something about.

If you've got a popular game, you've got new accounts starting up and old ones going stagnant all the time. No matter what sort of screw up developers make, it will be ages before it has any impact on new accounts since word of mouth of this sort among those not already part of a game community is slow to nonexistent. At the same time, drop off will not be immediate either. Many will hang on to their accounts under the hope that things will be fixed, others will just feel like they've got to get a little more value out of all the time/money they've already sunk into the game, and others just won't care enough to quit. In other words, short of a developer who implements a mission that everybody has to play within a week or have their character deleted, a mission with a 1% success rate and failure equals the character being deleted, you just can't really mess up in a manner that is going to result in the magical feedback you delude yourself into believing a subscription brings.

Even when the trend is more accounts going stagnant than new ones starting up, how can you determine that it's due to an issue developers can or should address? Maybe it's just been so long since any new PVE content was added that people are taking a perfectly natural break and they'll restart when an expansion comes out. You won't actually know until after you launch an expansion and don't see the numbers improve, which is exactly the same scenario that occurs with a model like GW uses.

Your second wonk scenario is trying to overplay the advantage of people not playing. When you consider the actual game content of something like WoW (and compare it to something like the Oblivion games), they're not really doing a whole heck of a lot development wise that isn't going to be recaptured completely in the initial sales - subscription fees are just gravy on top of what is an already paid for bit of content. On the other hand, because of the sub model, they are expected to provide much more extensive in game help, game marshals, etc. that something like GW does not. While it's covered by the sub fee, it's in their interest to be able to get you to pay them full price for their game, play it for 2-3 months, and let your account go stagnant. That's probably what a large percentage of their player base does, and I'm sure they're just as slap happy with them as Anet is with those who don't try and milk a $40 purchase into a 2 year grind drain on their servers. Certainly they have an interest in continuing subs, but so long as initial sales of the core game and expansions are strong, they're not going to be crying nor getting the sort of feedback you imagine they are.

you are correct; however, the problem is not so much in my calculations but6 with anet. They cancelled the 6 month turn around time which the calculations assume would continue when we did the calcuation.

If you're able to stay subscribed and interested for so long, then Blizzard must be doing something right.

I think their business model is new to the western retail sector. It's pretty common eastern-wise, both retail and online.

As far as which model, I don't mind either. Subscription isn't bad. In fact it's no different than a cable tv or netflix subscription. If there is new content coming out then its good. If it's stagnant, then looking for another game may be an option. Then again, a non-subscription based game is the same way I suppose. It really matters how long the game in question lasts. WoW is still going strong since 2004. GW lasted 2.5 years (2005, 2006, plus a smaller expansion in 2007) before they moved onto something else. The next one isn't due till maybe 2009, which leaves a gap there. If they stick to GW2 and don't decide to up and move to yet another variant which requires waiting for a year to a year and a half then they may have somethign. Otherwise people will stick to what seems consistent.

EDIT: On the other hand the gameplay has the most to do with it I would imagine. The RPG PvP'ers dream (Fury) had a similar business model and has failed miserably. The gameplay had as much to do with it as well as the prospect of an RPG PvP-only game being able to support itself without the monetary infusion of the greater number of PvE players. GW managed it because of both, so I'd say you can't just blame one thing or another on the price model. On a side note, maybe ANet can use that as some kind of excuse to kill (arena-based) PvP in GW2 before it's too late.. I know, I digress :-)

Anyhow, more than just the subscription model make up whether a game works or not.

If you know anyone working at Blizzard you can ask them about the MMO-like installment of Diablo being developed. ArenaNet has its work cut out for it. While WoW may be subscription-based, its the only thing at Blizzard that is so. That means they aren't stuck on one type of plan either...

Yeah, true (I guess you speak for your experience on that and I don't doubt it's true). But it could also be the addiction, since you played hard because you paid a lot. Or the feeling that leaving the game would be like wasting all the money you invested (which in your case is apparently the same as the amount invested in GW, but you had 2 accounts for Prophecies in the later and I'm still wondering if you played the 2 games the same amount of time). It's exactly like saying "if people are getting drunk, alcohol companies must be doing something right" or "if people get lung cancer, cigarette companies must be doing something right".

It is indeed a very fun game. It feels very traditional in an RPG sense in how you build your character and such. Not to mention that there's a *huge* amount of stuff you can do: Will you go through a hardcore dungeon and kill bosses for awesome gear, or skip that and focus on being able to ride a dragon?

And I can't say I'm terribly addicted. I'm only on it for about three nights a week. Now TF2 on the otherhand...

I played which account had the character I wanted to spend time with. That's why I was a little pissed when they made it so you could buy expansion slots, I could've saved some moolah.

I'm still a little confused with the point of that statement, though.

That's the wrong way to compare them. It's more accurate to say "If people keep buying this alcohol, then the alcohol companies must be doing right", and "if people keep buying our cigarettes, then cigarette companies must be doing right."

Nonetheless, it's the quality of the game that's going to keep most addicted. Look at Halo 3.