Guild Wars 2

Title says it all. When most games only charge a purchase fee and nothing else and they start dropping the price like crazy; it usually indicates a game that is losing its popularity. This isn’t meant to be a “OH NO THE GAME’S DYING” thread, its just something that could be quite possibly true.

It doesn’t matter what you say this thread isn’t, it’s exactly like all of the other threads about this game supposedly dying.

Prices for games drops over time. It’s also right before the holidays so its likely a possibility that it’s just on sale.

Let’s see, the holidays are coming up…and someone might want to buy the game for themselves or someone else as a gift. What would bolster those sales? Dropping the price a bit?

Hey, by pure coincidence, there also happens to be a big Wintersday event coming too. How about that?

Huh…I’m sure neither of these things have anything to do with them lowering the price.

Sales are reasonable, but when you do three things in a row in order to invite newcomers to the game in less than a month looks like a flashing sign for trouble. (The three events that I am talking about is the Refer a friend, then price drop for the deluxe, and then the extra $15 price reduction.) All of these marketing attempts took place in just a few weeks.

As for the people saying “oh christmas is coming up” the attempts to get new people to join started back in mid november, not just now.

So what you’re saying is that they should do absolutely nothing to get new players and just let the player base stagnate? The frequency doesn’t make a difference.

Frequency makes a ton of difference, it shows the previous attempts most likely didn’t work.

It’s common practice to drop your price after a release in order to entice more sales. It doesn’t signify anything.

If we’re going to throw around conspiracy theories, I think that they are just trying to get rid of their extra stock before the end of the world hits.

It’s the discussion thread, perfectly fine to talk about theories.

“Fail” has to be decided upon a standard of success.

How would you consider if this game have succeeded or not? Is the initial objective for maintaining the game’s original game price?

If you can sell a product for a high price, you dont sell it for a low price.

Wait wait wait…you mean to tell me, two week before Christmas, something reduced in price?

/mind blown

Dafomen.7892:

If you can sell a product for a high price, you dont sell it for a low price.

This makes a lot of sense.

The game isn’t failing, not even close.

/thread

I bought the game for the same price when it went live (through a 3rd party site).

ANet could give GW2 away for free and still make money on gems.

This seems more like a troll than a discussion.

Actually a slight reduction in price for the holiday season is a pretty good idea (they do it with all sorts of other things in retail anyways; and those items aren’t failing, even really successful brands/items do it). I see this all the time at retail stores (cleasrance on the other hand… usually either means a new model or the item died lol). Put a red tag on an item that says “SALE!” and people usually trip over themselves trying to get it.

Gw2 is doing fine for now, I think the populations are settling down now to what they will average at (people were leaving in droves a month in because of all the stupid bugs all over the place; a bunch of which have been fixed now).

That’s not to say Anet can slack up though; there is still plenty to be worked on to get the game to a stable place. Hopefully, we will see a good portion of what needs to be done patched here in the next few weeks…

Naw man its just a sale. This is their way of celebrating getting so many nods of accomplishments from reviewers and such.

Yes, because failing games can afford to advertise during the Coming Attractions portion of the new “The Hobbit” film…

(/sarcasm)

Clearly a lot of people here don’t have a business sense nor even look at industry standards and practices.

Doshingham.6197:

Title says it all. When most games only charge a purchase fee and nothing else and they start dropping the price like crazy; it usually indicates a game that is losing its popularity. This isn’t meant to be a “OH NO THE GAME’S DYING” thread, its just something that could be quite possibly true.

It’s obvious you don’t know anything about marketing or business, or are just trolling.

Aggressive pricing combined with heavy marketing ahead of the biggest consumer shopping week of the year.

Yeah.

The game is hugely successful and obviously making a ton of money. And with all the marketing (adverts just before the hobbit movie? way to target the demographic), GW2 is set to sell like hot cakes over xmas too.

Every single sign points to a simple reality: GW2 is doing very, very well.

It’s called the Christmas Holidays everything goes on sale

plus this is their main source of income.

Of course, the game must be failing. Why, in fact, the reason we are all on these forums right now is because the game failed so hard from all the people trying to get online after the Wintersday patch, that we can’t get into the game.

That is some amazing failure, when you fail from being too popular.

The game is crashing right now because its finals week haha.

A discount is a great incentive to buy a product you are unsure about getting.

I’m sure I’m not the only who looks for discounts / bargains when shopping for anything; hence is an appropriate pricing strategy to implement!

Of course, maybe Anet wants to squeeze more sales, and be more competitive which a lot of businesses do especially during the Christmas period. After all, there is a lot of competition out there!

At this stage, given that it is close to Christmas, it may be premature to conclude Anet are offering a discount due to the game losing popularity or dying etc, and it is for a LIMITED TIME only so the price will go back up soon again…

Doshingham.6197:

Dafomen.7892:

If you can sell a product for a high price, you dont sell it for a low price.

This makes a lot of sense.

Yes because all those TVs that were sold the day after Thanksgiving for as much as 40% off would have never sold at their normal price.

or maybe it’s because it was a sale to get more customers in the stores to spend money on other things. Hmm.. that strategy couldn’t work with a game like Guildwars that has microtransactions at all.

Why don’t you do some research on F2P games and see how other titles (LOTRO) have actually made more money on microtransactions than they ever did on box sales. Or does that not make sense either because existing customers somehow don’t generate as much revenue as new customers?

In the walmart near me GW2 is already in the bargain bin.

Humm… I bought it at full price right before it went on sale…. silly me.

weird maximus, because they’re still selling it for 59.99 at my walmart, and I live 15 minutes away from their corporate office. And it’s still listed for 59.99 on walmart.com too. Maybe it’s near the bargain titles, but that’s just walmart’s stupid, constant need to rearrange their displays because some pencil pusher from corporate thought the mindless masses might be more inclined to make a purchase if the white box is next to a blue and a red one.

In pretty much all the game stores/sections, GW2 sits somewhere alongside Dishonoured, CODBOPS2 and Far Cry 3.

It’s really visible from across the store since the box is all white and quite unadorned, unlike the others.

If Steam sales are any indication, price drops drive revenue. Dropping the price by 50% can result in a 300% or higher sales increase, actually leading to more revenue while bringing more players to the game.

Now look… I left the game because I felt led astray by “we are the supernew, different game” marketing after the introduction of the glimpse of a gear treadmill. So did a lot of people apparently. But this game sold a tremendous amount of copies in just a few months and is still played by a lot of people who bought it. Yes, sub-endgame content is probably rather empty, but that is just the way MMORPGs are, a lot less people start new characters simultaneously after launch and rather focus on the end game grind. The game apparently also managed to get some major 2012 awards. It is a very good game (even though the “dishonesty” of anet drove me away) with a reasonable economic success. Sales after an introduction period and especially before christmas are a standard marketing strategy and in no way an indicator that the game is failing. Apparently every quantum of discontent isn´t complete today with an accompanying claim of a game “dying”. No, it is not and certainly won´t be for a long time – even with a lot of people leaving because they were disappointed by anet like myself. It´s just the same with every new MMORPG, you lose a certain amount of players after launch for different reasons.

What you have to understand is that when a company releases a game at full price, it is only likely to attract the fans that have been highly anticipating it who either pre-order it or buy it near release day. Therefore, after a month or so, sales will drop off because all of the franchises fans will have the game and the general public that may not understand what it is just see an expensive game. By dropping the price they give the general public more reason to buy it.

Plus more importantly, MMO players are far too used to downloading a client for free and then playing their game for free perhaps with the option to buy things with real money actually in-game or paying a monthly subscription after a trial period. With Guild Wars you don’t get that, so people are having to fork out full price for something with no idea whether they’ll like it or not. If you’re a MMO fan you’re likely to say meh, I’d rather download something for free and pay for it later.

They have to do these promotions to keep players coming in. I highly doubt it means the game is ‘failing’. Purely expanding if anything.

Are you referring to World of Warcraft? They slashed their pricing for panda pack by 50% recently.

Its long overdue imo. Very soon, it will cost nothing to play that game. F2P FTW.

Ya the population has gone south fast. Especially after the Nov 15th patch and Ascend. Add on top of that the open world loot nerf – Pve is almost dead except frac dungeon where you get gear and loot. Really bad design decision especially since they said it would be available elsewhere.

Spvp is OK for now and still get hotjoin. TPVP is toast right now.
WvW – Toast as well because there have been no updates and it has grown stale and stagnate.
Overall pop is low and I expect to see a free to play announcement with the Epic expansion type content in February in order to entice new people and old gamers as well.
Just my feedback on the situation.

Apple doesn’t but stuff on sale. World of Warcraft wasn’t on sale for 5 years.

Draw your own conclusions.

Doshingham.6197:

Dafomen.7892:

If you can sell a product for a high price, you dont sell it for a low price.

This makes a lot of sense.

It doesn’t make any sense. A lower price means you sell more.

Zeldain.5710:

Apple doesn’t but stuff on sale. World of Warcraft wasn’t on sale for 5 years.

Draw your own conclusions.

false…..

Unless you mean buying straight from apple, but I don’t know about that
.

Assassinin.4963:

Are you referring to World of Warcraft? They slashed their pricing for panda pack by 50% recently.

Its long overdue imo. Very soon, it will cost nothing to play that game. F2P FTW.

The dropped the prices like 5 years after release, not 3 months afterwards.

Doshingham.6197:

Title says it all. When most games only charge a purchase fee and nothing else and they start dropping the price like crazy; it usually indicates a game that is losing its popularity. This isn’t meant to be a “OH NO THE GAME’S DYING” thread, its just something that could be quite possibly true.

Data came out of Valve recently that indicated a massive surge in units sold (and incidentally profits) from having a sale, it essentially works along the lines of ‘the greater the reduction in price, the greater the number of people buy it’ as people who wouldn’t have paid $60 for the title on release may be comfortable paying $35-$40 later down the line.