14 Feb 2008 at 22:00 - 44
I think as has been stated here, those profit margins for an almost 3 year old game is excellent.
It's definitely good news with GW2 on the way(sometime),
No MMO can compete with blizzard and WoW when it comes to profit, it's just stupid to think so in my opinion.
Why, WoW is so popular I really have no idea - because it's not ground breaking or the end all best MMO out there.
Though, I Suppose it's just the legions of loyal fans blizzard have had over the years moving in to WoW, then you have your players who just want the next big thing - then new players that have never heard of blizzard or maybe never played an MMO before wow who love the game.
From what I've seen though, ANET keeps in touch with their players a lot better than blizzard and are extremely generous in providing annual events etc for such a large game that has no monthly fee's.
ANET has really impressed me with their business model and have actually made me believe they actually give a shit about their players beyond how much money we give them.
People have been giving them shit about exploits running rampant lately, but they are a relatively small company compared to most game companies when it comes to employee numbers.
For the size, and being full time on a completely new game/engine for GW2 I think they are still doing an excellent job managing GW - and the fact that they plan to keep the servers open afterward is also a great idea, considering some people may pick up GW2 that haven't played the first set of games - want to pick them up to get in on the overall lore of the game and figure out who all these characters are they are playing with.
All in all, those are excellent figures for a highly underrated game that is almost 3 years old
GG Anet, keep it up.