I just wanted to provide some clarity on the “fastest-selling of all time” issue. Also, I’ll thank killcannon for providing some contextual data to compare.
First, what does “fastest growing” mean? There are a variety of ways to measure it. Some would say that “sales within the first week” are all that should be considered. For our purposes, we can eschew a static timeframe that excludes data after a certain date in favor of “most copies sold in the shortest amount of time,” which we can compare fairly using reported sales numbers after a certain timeframe since release. That is, we can see both how many copies were sold by different games in the same period, as well as how long it took different games to reach the same sales threshold (if ever).
Two things we definitely have to acknowledge when making this metric determination are:
1) “…in the West”
and
2) Unless you count MMO expansions as individual games
Then why is it when I google “fastest selling MMO” I keep getting SWTOR returns? You would think if what you said was true it would be bigger news.
This is problematic. You should never base any premise whatsoever on what you find as the top result for searching for a keyphrase on Google. For one thing, the phrase itself might be inadequate to obtain the results you’re looking for. For another, Google does not sort results by what is the most recent or the most accurate, but by which links have the highest PageRank.
News articles about SWTOR are rated highly by this algorithm. When SWTOR became the fastest-selling MMO of all time (which, in 2011, it did), it shattered the previous recordholder handily (in becoming the fastest-selling MMO, it also eclipsed the total sales of the previously fastest-selling games by a fair margin). This was a big deal!
However, it retained this record for less than a year, when it was overtaken by GW2. This is simply the fact of the scenario, not some kind of subjective assessment of what occurred. As to why it isn’t “bigger news,” I suppose it’s a fair question, but mainly one for the marketing department at ArenaNet. It might be a wise thing to base a campaign around during a free weekend/sale event.
Yes they sold 3 million fast, but they are not the fastest selling MMO of all time, that honor goes to SWTOR according to every other source I can find.
This is simply incorrect. And since you chose to say “according to every source,” I unfortunately have to question how much time you even spent looking.
SWTOR reached 2 million copies sold in four weeks, an incredibly impressive feat, especially considering the records it broke to reach that milestone. However, Guild Wars 2 accomplished this feat in just over two weeks. – and this timeframe also included a brief period when digital sales of the game were halted. It then went on to sell roughly another million in the remainder of 2012 which is significant because SWTOR simply never reached this figure at all. As of February 2012, EA was still sticking with an ‘over 2 million’ sales estimate, where the “active subscriber” pool was thought to have stabilized at 1.7 million.
Thus by either practical metric we might use based on this data- either “most sold within two weeks” or “shortest time to reach 3 million”- Guild Wars 2 wins handily and without much threat, at present, in the “fastest-growing MMO of all time” category (again, once you account for only the Western market, as well as not counting WoW’s expansions as individual games). In contrast, World of Warcraft, which was itself the fastest-selling PC game (not just MMO) at the time of its release, took roughly 8 months to reach 2 million subscribers and essentially, no other games are even a part of this discussion. EVE Online, notable for having consistent post-launch growth (like WoW, GW2 and no other MMOs at all ever in the West), has barely 500,000 subscribers total, and only crossed that line in 2013.
Regardless of how you feel about GW2 as a game, I hope we can all acknowledge these factual aspects of the MMO marketplace. Thanks for reading!
