Is GW business model really unique?

Basically, I was trying to say that the two total amounts of money should be normalised to the amount of time played. It doesn't change the price you pay, but it changes the cost per hour for you, if that is important. (one would even have to subjectively quantify the amount of "fun" had, but that's difficult to discuss)

Yep, whatever the business model, the quality plays a huge part (which is the reason why the question "to p2p or not p2p?" is inappropriate when considered alone). And that can be graphics, rythm of various play mechanics, storyline/immersiveness/universe-consistency, pvp/co-op challenge, personal achievement, grinding/l33tness/title-hungry, shiny weapon/armor/special effects, and so on.

Anyone defending GW p2p is (possibly without realising it) signing a death warrant on GW and Anet. Nevertheless, GW2 will introduce new elements to the business model, but that is left to speculation.

I'm against Play to pay structures as well, but I won't go a far as saying they are as evil as cigarette companies.

WoW, by itself, won't kill you. If you lose your job, your family, and your friends... well, then that's a problem (as with any addiction).

I don't think pay to play is any more addictive than any other video game, and actually, the cost involved might get people more motivated to quit. Then again, the "investment" theory might play a part as well.

I would be interesting to research the psychological effects of Pay-to-play. I definately think people generally have the misconception that higher costs = higher quality. So that's a factor as well.

I would argue the contrary: quitting in GW is only related to one purchase, while quitting in WoW (well, it seems to me, I've never played WoW but read people who did) has the weight of months of fees paid. With GW, you "feel" more free and less "weight" attached to your account (as I said before, there's clearly an emotional weight, but most of the time we get over it, though it's not always easy).

It seems to me to be the same "tactics" used by mobile phone operators (I've never paid a contract and am only using Pay as you go; furthermore I've been working with people involved in big phone companies and it seems to be a case of "addiction" but not one that fits the medical criterion, fortunately for them) or broadband providers. Funnily, these business models would have been massively rejected years ago, but the current generation made them possible. I know for example that purchase of ringtones and shiny features is one of the cornerstone of mobile operators business models, which is indeed a very silly thing ("look how cool my ringtone is" ... it's only a ringtone guys!)

This is clearly not a matter of life and death! But indeed that's also why it's becoming more and more acceptable. I know that people in the business of SaaS (Software as a Service) are waiting for this to make you pay monthly your M$ Office. And until micropayments becomes the norm, we will very likely loose money on this deal.

It's both. I played quite a bit of WoW in its first year. You hit a point where it's not the same game you started with - guys you were playing with in the "good old days" have moved on to other things, there's less soloable PvE content, more "elite" and less fun stuff you have to do "get ahead" - in short, more grind, more time, less return of fun. You're faced with either needing to really commit to the game, find an endgame Guild, or twiddle your thumbs doing whatever you can to have fun even though there's not as much of that as there once was. Yet, you just can't bring yourself to cancel the renewal on your account; after all, you do have months of time invested and a not insignificant amount of money "invested" and as I mentioned earlier, it's an all or nothing proposal, once you stop paying, you can't so much as load up a town and spend a few minutes dancing by the post box. So you keep letting the drain of money occur...

But, there is a wall, or at least there was for me. It's like in poker, if you're smart, you realise there's nothing stupider than throwing more money in a pot you're almost certainly not going to win just because you're "invested" in it, so you do finally quit. The game reaches a point where no matter how much money you have spent on it, you won't actually be getting $15 worth of fun out of it this month, so you cut your losses.

And, even if you refuse to play the new expansion even though they mailed you a DVD with a free trial code like some fabled drug dealer, Blizzard still comes out ahead. I spent more on WoW than I ever will on GW1. Whether or not I go back for more isn't important, their business model got me to part with more money than GW for, I expect, less return. Brilliant from the perspective of making money, not so brilliant for earning long term customer goodwill. I'll be pre-ordering GW2 (and probably the CE), I won't be touching WoW again.

I'd consider it the same account because in order for me to more fully experience the game, without deleting a character I invested time in, I had to purchase another account.

My point isn't saying that "GW is P2P," but that non-p2p games can be just as addictive and expensive.

Dunno about you, but I'd feel pretty bummed if my $200+ account got hacked to bajeesus.

I guess I don't understand the debate in this thread. I'm a fairly new GW player, but isn't their business model the same as the one most PC game makers have used in the past?

Sell a core game. If it does well, sell an expansion. The expansion makes money based on the idea that although there will be less buyers, the resources needed to make the expansion should be much less than the core experience.

As a customer, if you didn't like the core game, you would show that by not buying the expansion.

The only difference here is that ANet makes more "expansions" and they can each be considered stand-alone titles with the exception of GWEN.

I think this discussion failed to mention an important point regarding a business model (Bmodel for short), from a holistic point of view (i.e., not looking at the money only):

while p2p proposes a rather "negative" Bmodel, not in the sense that money is bad but rather that it's a weapon on the user side (collateral dammage FTL), Anet proposes with GW a positive Bmodel where this "weapon" (punishment) is not available in an immediate sense (it's rather the contrary: they're obliged to improve over a longer period of time, rather than improve on "smalller points" each months) and they rather offer a "Community relation" via special relations to fansites and CR people like Gaile and Andrew. And we have several updates a month, we don't have to wait for a "GW v2.3".

The downside is that Anet's tradeoff means that "smaller points" can sometimes end up at the bottom of the todo list, in particular when a very vocal minority (GWG is small inside the GW population and these people are few on GWG) will give lengthy arguments about this graphical glitch or that quest bug. According to Gaile's comment that sales are ok, it seems that the GW population is very happy with this Bmodel. Some people will unfortunately quit because of a few cockups (I can imagine that being banned wrongfully and not having access to your account for a few days is annoying, but well it's not the end of the world when you don't pay for these few days)

In p2p games, forums get a magical +100 in whining and 'I quit' threads bonus.

Exactly. Anet simply took the tried and true standard video game business strategy and applied it to a MMORPG (albeit, with the not-realized potential of two $50 Chapters a year).

I'd argue that play-to-play models are the radical ones, and that as more free to play MMORPGS enter the market, their days are numbered.

But that won't change the fact that WoW is making Blizzard billions of dollars. (anyone have Blizzards net worth or any profit figures?)

Problem is that nearly every single one of those games that are similar to GW in terms of payment have sucked terribly. It's giving some pretty bad rep.

Well, I'm not much of a sales rep or terribly good at math, but in the billions I'd say it's over 9000 (!!!!!!!!!!!)

If you consider this game to be a MMO then yes the business model is unique especially when GW2 hits the shelves. If you feel this game is simply a rpg online game then no, many other games use the f2p model.

Pay to play games offer tons more content but unfortunately they charge a monthly fee. In order to be truely unique and break the mold they need to offer the same amount of content that WOW, EQ2, Lineage2 does and make it free. Not 100% sure that can happen but I have high hopes for Anet for they are one of the best in making games.

Guild Wars Prophecies- $50
Guild Wars Factions CE: - $70
Guild Wars Nightfall - $50
Guild Wars Eye of the North - $35
EotN Preorder + GOTY Bonus Items - $10
TOTAL: $215

20 Months total playing time. Still playing.

If charged $15 a month: $300
+ Game: $50
TOTAL: $350

I hear that World of Warcraft is $15 a month, and essentially, if I was paying that much, I would have spent a lot more. I still play Guild Wars. It's still on even as I type this message out.

I'm actually surprised there aren't more like GW. There are several that make you pay for premium service, more levels, better equipment, etc.

But as far as I know, there are no MMORPGS that offer full access to the game for buying one Chapter (with the caveat that Guild Wars has 3 distinct chapters, and one expansion).

And even though you can argue that a Chapter is just "extra" content, I think there is a huge difference between buying armor and weapons for real money, then buying access to a whole slate of virtual stuff in the form of a Chapter.

In the end, we are trying to put a monetary value on pixels. In Guild Wars case, I believe the sum is worth more than the individual prices. And so far, no other company has made a "virtual" product that has impressed me enough to spend as much or to play as long as Guild Wars has (and I've been playing computer games for over 25 years now!)

I played WoW heavily for 9 months, I never saw all this extra game content you speak of. I saw a more polished interace, more cohesive game world, better partying mechanics, etc., but not more content. I don't know what was added with Burning Crusade, but even it doubled the game content, it still doesn't make it "tons more" than GW.

The difference is not *content*, the difference is time involved to experience the content. In GW you can run through all of the content on a cursory basis in a couple of months, tops, for all the campaigns even as a casual player and *then* if you're so inclined you can go back and do all the time consuming stuff like titles, elite skill hunting, beating all the missions with bonuses, hard mode, etc.. WoW, EQ, etc. take that time sink jibjab and make in inclusive to seeing the content in the first place. It's a way of making "finishing" the game into a much lengthier, i.e. profitable process for the game developers.

It's arguable which is the better play experience. If things like money and time weren't an issue, I'd rather still be playing WoW. Since they are, and are going to continue to be an issue, I'll take GW's model hands down. As a player, I get all the highlights of a big MMO without either the bill or the time requirement.

The only way Guild Wars is "unique" is in that the chapters are just stand-alone expansion packs. I can't really go past that since you know I don't consider GW an MMO.

Zul'Aman, The Black Temple, Battlegrounds, Zul'Gurub, An'Qiraj, Listgoeson, TONS of shit has been added and changed since the game's release.

I agree that quality is better than quantity but content is what keeps gamers playing longer and keeps them more interested in playing. There is nothing wrong with having some timesinks in the game. Perfect example was Eye of the North, I thought it was a good expansion but it was seriously way too short. People wanted more of the goodness, more things to do. As it is now you can complete any campaign in less than 3 weeks time. Then it becomes repetitive and people start to get bored and not everyone owns all 3 campaigns. People want more new areas to explore and more things to do because not everyone gets involved in the pvp aspect of Guild Wars. Level 20is way to easy to achieve and you miss out on the enjoyment of developing your character.

This is getting somewhat off topic, but you seem to be mistaking content for time spent getting to said content. Artificially increasing the amount of time someone spends doing nearly the exact same things over and over again to get their food pellet does not mean you get any more food pellets in the two games. I never experienced more content, just more time spent getting at said content.

There are advantages to both models, and more content *could* be a function of the pay to play, but in my experience with MMOs, it's not. They increase the grind to move through what story there is, they throw one farming quest after another in your way. When you get to what could conceivably call the end they make you go through one tier of elite dungeons that take hours each, require large groups of people to coordinate everything, and one wipe can guarantee you won't finish, and if you do finish, only a few of the people will actually get anything worth having, so they have to turn around and do it again, and again, and again.

Take your GWEN comments, they're exactly why I think for a class of casual gamer that GW wins out in the game model. If it were WoW, for example, you'd have to max out the Norn Title Track before you could move on past the initial allies quest and they'd have a series of two or three dungeons in each of the three quest branches that required 20 man teams and four dozen runs each to move to the next one. The overall content wouldn't be different at all, they'd just make more work out of it. With GWEN, it's your call, spend a day running through just the main quests, or work on some new titles and collect some more elite armor. Basically you seem to be critiquing GW's game and sales model design specifically because it makes the time sinks purely optional to experiencing the monsters, the dungeons, the scenery, the heros, the storylines, etc. and praising game design that doesn't serve up any more actual content and winds up locking out whole reams of players from ever seeing more than a subset of what's there due to the time required to get to much of. For some players, sure, I can see the appeal of knowing you'll either have to work your butt off or never see a tier 8 Graznar's Orb of Death and Resurrection that only drops once out of a hundred runs of the toughest dungeon in all the land, but for others, it's just a game they play when they're done getting the kids in bed and they've got to be up at 6AM to get to work again.

If you don't like the GW game design philosophy, there's plenty of games out there that are plenty happy to take your money and your time. Personally, I'm really glad I found something that lets me get my game fix without the unnecessary hurdles to play.

Just gonna say that bit there is wrong. Aside from that, most of what you say of WoW is a bit of an exaggeration.

I've known thousands of games like that (then again, I guess we all have different fixes). Are you saying that you've finally found an MMO without all the hurdles, grinds, etc.?

Did you say over 9000 bryant?!

Why is that so popular?
That show was silly. Half of it was people assuming the bad guy was dead during the 5 minute explosion cloud settling, only to see him standing unscratched after it cleared.
Then everyone would shake and their pupils would vibrate and they'd go 'uhh...uhhhh.uhhh' in disbelief of his power for another five minutes.
Then, 10 episodes later when they actually finished fighting, they meet another dude whose 10 times stronger.

Silly.

I have noooo idea.

Nonetheless, I laughed at about half-way in when it was classical style.

I actually beat Factions, Nightfall, and Eye of the North all in 1 month... with some help from my cousin and guild. I started GW about 2 months ago and I've got 5 level 20s all well geared along with their Heroes. I got Obsidian armor for 1 of my characters as well. Yeah, I agree with you, there's not a whole lot of content in GW. However, it's just enough for casual gamers and somewhat hardcore ones too. For a hardcore gamer like myself though, all 4 games presents little to no challenge. Especially because I started off with playing one of the most hardcore MMOs: Final Fantasy XI for 2+ years.

Regarding GW's business model...
I think people don't realize that ANet doesn't HAVE to charge people to play each month to make good money and profit. GW's game world is INSTANCED and not PERSISTENT. There doesn't need to be constant server maintenance and tweaking like most p2p MMOs. Also, GW may be addicting, but it's not as addicting as many other MMOs, which is a good thing. I like the business model of ANet's. And I believe that all other MMOs should be done this way. You either charge people to purchase your game(s) OR you charge them monthly but don't make them pay for your game(s). MMO companies/developers charging consumers twice is unethical and needs to stop.

While a few people do get addicted because of P2P fees, something that reporters etc. overdo and blame completely, it's mostly the quality of the game - and the player's tastes as well - that'll determine how addicted they'll become. To this day I have still not wasted as many hours with any game as I have with Morrowind.

It's not like paying monthly leaves you empty-handed.

Did I ever say it did? Nope, not at all. In fact, I said I played FFXI for over 2 years and didn't even mention I played Dungeons and Dragons Online for half a year. Both are p2p.

I said it's UNETHICAL to charge gamers TWICE, once to purchase the game and expansions and another monthly fee. This trend should stop being the norm in the MMO industry. The only reason why I started playing (and bought) Guild Wars was because you didn't have to pay a subscription. That doesn't mean I can't pay to play or that I would be broke if I did. It just means I refuse to be ripped off.

They're still having the same account, same fee. They're just upgrading their account to be compatible with the expansion.

In regards calling it "unethical", that really depends on the buyer themselves: Do they really want to devote so much to this game? Well for me, I love WoW, so yeah sure. They're a good company, it's a great game, I'm willing to support both - just like ANet and Guild Wars.

I wouldn't say unethical either, I'd just say kinda lame. But hey, ANet does the same. They do want to make a profit, after all.

It's hard to claim being "ripped off" if you've never tried the product.

And if you can no longer contribute to the thread, then don't post.

Bryant, wtf are you babbling about? Seriously...

The reason why I said I found the popular pay to play mmorpg design unethical, is because they revolve around time sinks all designed to milk exactly how long they can draw things out.
The incentive only being rewards. Rewards whose sole function is to mildly alleviate the time sinks. Time sinks which will always scale upwards at a greater rate than that of the rewards.
And then they lead people to believe it costs 14.99 a month to both keep the servers running and pay for their expert design crew to create more shallow time sink based content.

I often thinks it's insulting to our intelligence.

Well, I do enjoy playing WoW because I likes the dungeons and raids and I love playing my classes. But I do know a rather large handful of people who've quit for your reasoning, Red. But I also know more who play because it's fun and they enjoy the game.

I'm just "meh" towards it, really. It depends on the person's motive to continue playing: Are they doing it for fun, or are they trying to "get their money's worth?"

Hardly when playing with adults with lives. Party wipes, you ressurect, run back and find, oh crap, everything is respawned, half the guys say goodnight and the other half soon does the same. Wiping only doesn't affect things when people have unlimited time, no one I ever played with falls under that guise.

It's hardly much of an exaggeration if it's any at all, it's why I finally quit. When the most fun you're having for $15/month is fishing in a game because you don't have the time for the elite dungeons and development with the purely soloable/small party (i.e. 2) PvE stuff is moving slower than glaciers, you move on no matter how much you've spent on the game.


More or less, although the MMO part is merely icing that lets me play with friends easily. It's more the character based fantasy rpg where you run around and kill stuff and find loot. You give up the ability to find really rare, really powerful stuff for the ability to experience all of this with multiple characters and classes with a reasonable time investment for a fair price.

I agree Gambit Shinobi that it's unethical (I even think that the monthly fees are a rip off, given all the years and the millions customer, I'm sure Blizzard could have lowered the fees for everyone, not just offer 6 months reduced fees). But since it's a question of ethics, you're also entitled to disagree and have a different ethic.

I much prefer Anet's approach of taking what's necessary, plus a margin. Of course, given the numbers you gave about how much you spent in WoW and GW, I perfectly understand your opinion. I know that in my case, the numbers also speak for themselves.

Another point quickly mentioned before: WoW offers more content than GW, but to the "casual" player (as if there was only one kind of people like this , it does not make a difference because he will only access a small part of this. It's only interesting for serious/hardcore gamers (no semantics behind this, it's a question of amount of time "invested"). So overall, at the level of the whole gaming population, it does not make much sense to advertise your game as "bigger".

Yeah, the problem is in the last two words: there's nothing like "our intelligence", there's yours and mine (well sort of, I'm not stupid but not trying to make people believe I'm smart too). A lot of people don't think when it comes to games, they may even compare paying 15$ a month for WoW to paying 15$ a month for your mobile contract and it seems like a good deal. Or they're so rich that intelligence doesn't matter (look at this story of a very powerfull WoW character sold for several dozens of thousands of dollars).

Well, what if Anet decided to just add new content with no new heroes or skills. Everything from prophecies, merely new content. Players wouldn't be happy. Its something that simply can't be avoided, unless they give new skills as as an update. But then they wouldn't get their moneys worth from PvPers.

Since GW2 will have Persistant areas, will that change their Business Model?

They've said no, but I wouldn't be surprised to see some more incremental charges. It's a lot more expensive to maintain persistent world servers.

The GW business model is in fact a rarity. However, it is indeed flawed in the sense that, after they've acquired our money, they can do virtually whatever they want without penalty of a subscription cancellation. They can lose profit off of players that forfeit playing the game in only one aspect: not purchasing their bonus products or future games (but what're the chances of that due to the game's highly-addictive nature by default?).

On that note, they can implement just about any update and get away with it. GWars1 is such a beautiful, well-constructed game that even those opposing anet's "communisitc" changes will go out and buy GWars2 immediately when it comes out just because of the player's addiction developed over the course of 2.5 years of playing.

Hmmm, the fact that you are comparing things which are real life necessities(electricity, water, transportation) to a game....

Thing is, that's what MMOs were designed to be. For them to be a success, they offer what a regular console game doesn't: immersion. You can join that world, and talk and play with others like you in this world. You become that character, and the games good at their job cause you to invest time in them.

For some people this is ok. You log on, play for an hour or two, then log off. For those OCD personalities out there, however, an hour or two isn't enough. They form a personal attachment to the game, like any other addiction, and get upset when "their game betrays them." Hell, you want to see addiction, just check out WoW or the Korean MMOs. Most of your game play is grind-grind-grind, yet people spend hours a day doing just that.

On topic, it was unique when it came out, but other games are starting to use this model. Looking at the model before and after GW came out, it showed that people were willing to pay out 50 dollars a year or so for sagas/expansions, and it allowed people to put down the game for as long as they wanted, knowing they didn't have to go through the hassle of starting up their subscription again when they started playing again(just wait for the hundreds of updates to DL, lol). That gives GW players a freedom others don't have. The fact that storyline is so much a part of the game allows an attraction for casual play, not just the grindfest that OCD-addled players crave.

If you do get tired of the game and move on, they still have the money they gained from the sale of the game, as opposed to losing a subscriber's 10-15 bucks a month.

A better comparison would be WoW vs Cable TV.

If you spend $60 a month on cable, $15 a month for WoW won't kill you.

For me, I tried a demo of WoW and just couldn't get into it. I prefer Guild Wars. But there's nothing wrong with MMORPGS charging monthly, if people are willing to pay for it.


Now...

This argument that Anet somehow is free to ship out shoddy product is just flat wrong. If Anet did something to piss off a majority of players to the extent they quit, do you think they'd sell as many copies of GW2? No.

Instead of deciding to spend $15 a month, a GW consumer decides if they will spend $50 a year. It's different monetary amounts, and a different time frame, but the basic goal is still there: Customer satisfaction.

(and, to be sure, no company can please everyone.)

If it's in an instance, it takes a long time for things to respawn. And if you're getting respawns, that means that you're probably not in a good group. In raids, if you whipe you can usually do the boss 3-4 times before you hit respawns. Bear in mind that the instances usually reset within a week, so you can kill a boss on Tuesday and come back and see the boss still dead along with all the monsters leading up to him.

That aside, I've never known of raids that quit so easily after one whipe. It's probably because they didn't last long. And everyone in my raids is over 18 (half of them are over 30.)

This:

I've never heard of in WoW.

WoW was built from the ground up to be a group and community oriented game, so the endgame isn't going to be terribly solo-friendly. Sure, you could farm materials for craftable armor/weapons or farm up to buy a big ridable dragon, but those are just a few things you can do.

It also does take a lot of time. I know of quite a few casual raiding guilds (I guess I would fit into those) that only do raids with two different groups 3-4 nights a week. But there are a lot more hardcore ones I know of that do it almost every night that they can.

Nonetheless, that's just how the game is. It doesn't fit with everyone, but there are other games out there, too.

The only thing that's somewhat "unique" about it is that the expansion packs are standalone. Aside from that, we've been having expansion packs like this since...damn, Beyond the Dark Portal? What was the first expansion pack?

But still, it's no different than a successful RPG just getting more expansion packs. The only difference is that everyone's labeling GW an MMO.

Yeah, I don't remember having problems with respawns that much in WoW either.
But in Everquest 2....holy smokeronies.
It was full of them.
I found one raid instance that was really annoying.
http://www.raidwiki.org/wiki/index.p...aw_the_Ancient

GW business model really is unique let it go to hell qucikly on Taiwan,HK Server.

Only one way to buy GW is on NCtawian server.
First must buy "Gash" game coin.
Secend must change "Gash" game coin to "Ncoin" game coin
Then buy it (1,2,3 or GWEN) use 1300 "NCoin"

And NCTaiwan ban IP except IP in Taiwan,HK.

All Taiwan,hk GW player hope NCtaiwan go to hell^N quickly because New player listen to buy Gw hardly and no more want to play it.

What time Anet can leave NC??? No Taiwan,HK Gw player buy Taiwan,HK ver. GW2.

We all hate NCtaiwan

well one of the best ways to market soemthing is through word of mouth. if anet marketing sux (watch their ad LOL) do it for them. thats hwo i try to help gw along.