Guild Wars 2

I know that GW2 together with Final Fantasy 14 and WoW are the most played mmos but i wanted to know how many players it has in general the only thing i found was that many people were saying in posts that GW2 has sold in usa ,eu and china together around 7.300.000 copies by the end of 2014

ANet stated “Well over 5 million units” at a conference about 2 months ago.

I have no idea how many copies have been sold but I’m beginning to think that this is privileged information considering how reluctant ANet is to say.

Maybe this whole “core game bundled with the expansion” thing is so they can legally say they sold another copy of the game just for selling the expansion.

Kinda slippery if you ask me.

TheBlackLeech.9360:

Maybe this whole “core game bundled with the expansion” thing is so they can legally say they sold another copy of the game just for selling the expansion.

Kinda slippery if you ask me.

Shhhhh!!! Think of the jimmies!! Do you want them rustled again?

TheBlackLeech.9360:

Maybe this whole “core game bundled with the expansion” thing is so they can legally say they sold another copy of the game just for selling the expansion.

Kinda slippery if you ask me.

If a new player buys it, it would count. I’m sure they probably separate their product sales into categories anyway; it’s more organized that way.

And of that 7.3million how many people still play the game a small fraction old presume

Game population still has to be over a million right now. Whenever you come across an event that’s needed for the daily (SB or Shatt) you see how many people are still having fun.

I did bought my gw2 with like 6-7 other friends when it launched, but they all quit after hitting 80 and now im the only one left. So yea guess their total sales doesnt mean much lol

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I have no idea how many copies have been sold but I’m beginning to think that this is privileged information considering how reluctant ANet is to say.

For various reasons, it’s long been an industry tradition to be cagey about certain easy-to-measure-for-the-company benchmarks. Probably because they fear that people would misunderstand the metrics, especially those who aren’t familiar with industry standards. (This happens all the time with stock market analyses — people compared Apple & Microsoft to (the old) HP & Texas Instruments, Amazon to Apple, and so on.)

So not so much “privileged” as “please, investors, don’t let us be misunderstood.”

lmaogg.7325:

I did bought my gw2 with like 6-7 other friends when it launched, but they all quit after hitting 80 and now im the only one left. So yea guess their total sales doesnt mean much lol

I’m in a similar boat. I knew people that started towards the beginning but stopped shortly after they started. Had an older brother try the game a couple months ago and he gave up on it after a week. I had a friends list with some decent people I met in game, but I’ve never seen a single one of them on again.

I know some people that post here put a lot of merit into this site.

http://caas.raptr.com/most-played-games-may-2015-the-witcher-debuts-world-of-warcraft-stumbles/

I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that runescape has more players than even ff14. Runescape still has a massive amount of players.

lmaogg.7325:

I did bought my gw2 with like 6-7 other friends when it launched, but they all quit after hitting 80 and now im the only one left. So yea guess their total sales doesnt mean much lol

With Buy To Play, it still means a lot. With the Gem Store, population still means something too, though.

lmaogg:
You anecdote means about as much as mine: Everyone I started with is still playing and we’ve even recruited new people since then.

i assume the game population is at best 10% of total sales?

At the end of their first year, they release a fact sheet saying they sold over 3 million units and have a ~250k player base. That’s a little under 10% of total units sold. That’s like a video going viral and 90% of viewers thumb-downed/disliked it. It’s kind of crazy when you think of it that way.

But in Anet’s defense, selling 3 million copies of any game is freaking ridiculous. Having a quarter million active players is unheard of. And when you put those two numbers together… it doesn’t add up and for that reason they probably don’t want to really reveal the current state of the game is at anymore.

How many of the people who bought the game actually play or ever return when compared to WoW?

Surely not 7.3 million!

ChoChoBo.6503:

At the end of their first year, they release a fact sheet saying they sold over 3 million units and have a ~250k player base. That’s a little under 10% of total units sold. That’s like a video going viral and 90% of viewers thumb-downed/disliked it. It’s kind of crazy when you think of it that way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild_Wars_2

‘’By August 2013, the sales have shifted 3.5 million copies, with peak concurrency at 460,000’

It means at a specific time (12:00 am for exaple of that day ) , 460,000 ppl have been logged and playing in the same time
While later on for exaple at 13;00-14:00 , 100.000 ppl where playing the game
While in 14:00-15:00 , 200.000 ppl where playing
etc etc

ChoChoBo: You can’t really compare a game’s sales/retention figures with the like/dislike bar on a video. This retention rate could well be absolutely normal for an MMORPG.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I have no idea how many copies have been sold but I’m beginning to think that this is privileged information considering how reluctant ANet is to say.

For various reasons, it’s long been an industry tradition to be cagey about certain easy-to-measure-for-the-company benchmarks. Probably because they fear that people would misunderstand the metrics, especially those who aren’t familiar with industry standards. (This happens all the time with stock market analyses — people compared Apple & Microsoft to (the old) HP & Texas Instruments, Amazon to Apple, and so on.)

So not so much “privileged” as “please, investors, don’t let us be misunderstood.”

Yeah, but…..

WoW reports how many subscribers it has and how many it has lost since the last report. In addition you can see a site that shows graphically the numbers of players week by week.

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/weeklyactivity.php?serverid=-1

Aside from the one concurrency report back near launch, the most ANet gives is very general numbers. Maybe giving subscriber numbers is required by law but ANet is still acting like the number of copies sold and the concurrency (similar to the WoW site above) is top secret.

I came back after a three year hiatus, for what it’s worth.

Edit: And I’ve never had a feeling of population being scarce. Wherever I go there’s a ton of people running around doing stuff. Whenever there’s an event going on I see lots of activity in /m and players running to help each other. It’s brilliant!

WoW might have millions of subscribers, but you never see them because they’re all flying or teleporting from dungeons to raids.

Cassius.5084:

I came back after a three year hiatus, for what it’s worth.

Edit: And I’ve never had a feeling of population being scarce. Wherever I go there’s a ton of people running around doing stuff. Whenever there’s an event going on I see lots of activity in /m and players running to help each other. It’s brilliant!

WoW might have millions of subscribers, but you never see them because they’re all flying or teleporting from dungeons to raids.

Or they’re in their garrisons, playing an mmorpg by pushing buttons on a panel and waiting for loot to appear. (Seriously, that reminds me of the lab tests where they are teaching monkeys something. The monkey pushes a button and a piece of monkey chow drops down by it).

ChoChoBo.6503:

At the end of their first year, they release a fact sheet saying they sold over 3 million units and have a ~250k player base. That’s a little under 10% of total units sold. That’s like a video going viral and 90% of viewers thumb-downed/disliked it. It’s kind of crazy when you think of it that way.

But in Anet’s defense, selling 3 million copies of any game is freaking ridiculous. Having a quarter million active players is unheard of. And when you put those two numbers together… it doesn’t add up and for that reason they probably don’t want to really reveal the current state of the game is at anymore.

They said peak concurrency was 250k. That means that’s the most players they’d had online at the exact same time. Not how many were still playing.

They’ve never actually released information on the number of active players. I suspect partially because it’s hard to gauge in a buy-to-play game. With a sub game it’s easy, if they’ve paid their sub you count them as an active player. Without one it’s more complicated. They can count how many people have logged in that day, week, month etc. but they have no way of knowing if someone who doesn’t log in has quit or if they’re just on holiday, busy at work, their computer broke down etc.

But I suspect it’s also because it’s not actually as relevant to them. Sub games report on how many people are paying their sub because it’s their main source of income, which their investors need to know about, whereas free-to-play and buy-to-play games simply report how much money their players have spent buying in-game currency and whatever else they sell. (For GW2 it’s used box sales and gem sales.)

Games like Elder Scrolls Online which are made by private companies don’t report their numbers publicly at all because no one but them needs to know.

I wonder how many of those sales were to gold farmers.

Pockets.3201:

I wonder how many of those sales were to gold farmers.

Gold farmers/sellers probably use stolen credit cards to buy as most of the accounts don’t last long before getting terminated. Since the real owner of the credit card usually reverses these charges I doubt they are counted.

lol… maybe it seems like there are always a bunch of people around because of that thing Anet did… what did they call it? … oh yea, Megaservers…
You know that fancy name for server mergers they did in order to disguise dwindling population.

Not necessarily a bad thing. No one likes an empty server. Just annoys me when companies try to treat their customers like idiots. “oh don’t worry, we are doing well! We havent even had the need to issue server mergers yet….” … yes you have, anet.

SenorMoody.5908:

Just annoys me when companies try to treat their customers like idiots. “oh don’t worry, we are doing well! We havent even had the need to issue server mergers yet….” … yes you have, anet.

Don’t forget your tinfoil hats because ANet might send their secret agents to your house for saying stuff about them on the Internet.

I don’t see the problem. Blizzard did the same thing and no one accuses them of “disguising” anything. As long as there’s a population and it’s fun to play, there’s nothing to whine about. But, of course, some people always find something regardless if things are working or not.

Pockets.3201:

I wonder how many of those sales were to gold farmers.

How many of the sales do you think were to people you will never meet in the game?

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Or they’re in their garrisons, playing an mmorpg by pushing buttons on a panel and waiting for loot to appear.

I stopped playing three years ago, there were no garrisons at the time. But I agree, the social aspect of WoW is dead and buried by now.

In GW2 it’s very much alive.

ChoChoBo.6503:

At the end of their first year, they release a fact sheet saying they sold over 3 million units and have a ~250k player base. That’s a little under 10% of total units sold. That’s like a video going viral and 90% of viewers thumb-downed/disliked it. It’s kind of crazy when you think of it that way.

But in Anet’s defense, selling 3 million copies of any game is freaking ridiculous. Having a quarter million active players is unheard of. And when you put those two numbers together… it doesn’t add up and for that reason they probably don’t want to really reveal the current state of the game is at anymore.

It doesn’t work like that, every MMO loses similar numbers of people over time. It’s a fact of life that MMO players come to MMOs for specific reasons, and no MMO can or will satisfy all of those. Since this is b2p as well, it also means a lot of people who will have quit at one point in time, will come back, as I did about 2 years ago (played for a few months at launch, quit for a few months, came back and have been playing ever since).

The vast majority of my friends who played back then still play occasionally too, they’re just not on every day for hours.

The game is buy to play, they really don’t set out to keep player retention as high as subscription based games. I like the approach, GW2 is more of a game I can hop in and enjoy casually without feeling the pressure of a second job trying to keep up with the current tier of items with raids and such. Quite surprised to see just how often they do update the game though.