NCSoft Releases Quarterly Report - Guild Wars Surprises

Apply your own logic (1st sentence) to answer your own question: why should you care if you don't see this statistics via the number of people in outposts anyway?

I wouldn't care personally...it would just be fun to prove all those "Guild Wars is alive and well" people wrong. Maybe Anet is doing well, but that doesn't mean GW is. Weird thinking about it.

As would disproving you.

May be both are doing well, it's just you assessing (very subjectively) a situation you're no longer interested in (for the sake of simply arguing on boards). Weird heh?

Can't without the numbers.

Maybe but I doubt it. And I'd rather be the voice of reason rather than the voice of everything being great as far as this thread is concerned.

Indeed. so you also can't prove it.

There's no particular "reason" in your "opinion", it's subjective and you know it. I don't really care what this thread is about, I'm just saying you're not more reasonable that I am.

No, but I can make a pretty good guess with my eyes.

I am only in this thread because there were a lot of people saying "yay GW is alive and well" and I came in to tell them that wasn't neccessarily true. Unless you have a different opinion I don't know why you are in this thread.

You can't "guess" how many people are in instances unless your eyes are in front of the GW servers.

Guess what? I am of a different opinion, Gw is not dead, and if it's not necessarily true, it's not necessarily false either, which is a moot point.

My eyes see something different then, I see dozens of districts even hundreds filled with players when we have festivals. It doesn't say something about the average activity, but the events on their own succeed. The playerbase focuses on a few towns then. On a normal week day, it seems not as much players are ingame compared to the first years, but that's becasue the population is spread (way more content), people gather in guild halls and because this is an instanced game.

This game is still very much alive after 4 years, it's indeed in the end of its life phase like the poster below explains. It's a succes really and Anet wrote gaming history. Hence we still see good quarterly results.

Activity most likely decreased yes, but saying the game is dead is exagerated.

From the 1st page of this thread:
2007 sales: 1,756,000 copies/accounts activated (4,878,00 - 3,122,000)
2008 sales: 1,025,000 copies/accounts activated (5,803,000 - 4,878,000)

Thats a drop in sales of 42% compared to 2007..... expressed in accounts activated. Or when comparing Q4 2007 with Q4 2008 a drop of 43% for the quarter.

But we should not forget that the revenue model of a single game is way different than the revenue model of, for example a production company. Especially if it is a game that is not based on a monthly fee.

From a sales perspective, in it's life cycle this product is in it's end of life phase, no doubt about that. In 2008 they released some special combos en reduced pricing on the single campaigns, that's clearly an effort to still get as much revenue out of the product as they can. One can even argue that the XTH is a deliberate promotion to increase the number of account sales. Imagine how much sales would have dropped without those promotions.....

But beware, the above does not necessarily mean that the product is dying, nor does it say anything about the activity ingame, it only says something about the sales. As for activity, I find it quite remarkable that for the other games they state the maximum amount of players that was online at the same moment (the peak) during the reporting period, but not for Guild Wars..... but on the other side peaks in GW do not really say much about activity, special events like Canthan New Year can result in peaks that are not representative for the average activity. For games with a monthly fee the peaks represent the minimum amount of players that actually still pay for the game. So there it makes sence to report this number whereas it might not for a game with a one-time only fee.

GW's business model doesn't require people play actively, only that they come back eventually and purchase further expansions or more content in the online store.

You don't pay monthly, so they don't care if you're playing, as long as you eventually come back - which I assume the majority of people do that quit, as I know I do and have time and time again.

And well, with units sold... It's a really unreliable number to figure out active players. If we're talking units sold, then I have uh... 12 accounts... 2 of which have all campaigns, bonus packs, quite a few extra character slots and some other stuff... Which I'll guess might just be included in that figure.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter.

If you go to major towns and all of them have several districts, many of which filled with people, then you really don't have to worry about how many active accounts the game has. Obviously it has enough.

What you can look at however is content. There's only so much in the game, statistically it will eventually slowly die out. I don't doubt it can weasel its way to GW2 release; though, I imagine 2 years from now would be super sketchy at best. Most players should have left by then, I'd hope. But alas, they only need players to come back and buy stuff, not stay.

All people quitting GW and coming back does for them is reduce bandwidth.

A bit late, but chances are from what I can tell is that it'll never happen.

the reason gw "feel's" dead to me is because i think most of the community is now solo (or h/h) farming/grinding instead of grouping/pvping.


thought i'd post this here for perspective:

Guess how we can resolve the issue. Also it doesn't matter how many people are not in outposts if I can't see/team with them and they are soloing. Maybe I should be more specific...Guild Wars as a multiplayer MMO is dead. If I was a new player walking into 90% of the outposts with no players (where players should be) in them I would assume the game is dead too.

Guess how we can resolve the issue. You see the glass quarter full and I see it three quarters empty.

Festivals hardly count...those are primetime weekend events that cause a lot of people to come back to the game for short periods of time (and even then only on the few outposts where the festival is taking place). Go into 95% of the outposts in normal hours during normal days and good luck finding people.

Again...I am not judging the death of the game by how much money is being made by it. I am judging it by how many active players there are...so the people saying Guild Wars is making money (even though it is down like 50%) are not really responding to that point.

You're not looking where you should be looking: Guild Wars.

No, to be exact: neither you, nor me, can see the glass.

I suspect there is an all time low number of guilds as well...especially active guilds.

Because Anet doesn't want us to see how empty the glass is.

And I suspect you have absolutely no proof of that, although I'm sure you can gather some numbers to show us that A(t) < A(t-100). So it must mean that the game is dead, of course. /end sarcasm

Or they want us to see your empty statements?

Educated guesses are good.

Empty? I'd say strong. The only response to it is "Anet has no reason to", not "your statements are wrong".