Guild Wars 2

Well if that isn’t a big slap to the people who think the game is still alive!

No retail means that their last expansion didn’t sell as much as they thought, which is obvious due to the lack of rewarding content!

The new expansion was a bigger slap in the face, with the biggest joke revenant using old warriors longbow skills and guardians old tomes. All i saw in the trailers was same, redundant assets. Not even new mechanics to embrace gameplay(Because we don’t want to get the casuls out of their comfort zone and earn something new), even the mounts seemed like the zephyrite fiasco all over(with the crystals 1,2,3,4 abilities on skillbar).

Pretty disappointed, i thought they were going to turn this around, but instead they just reuse old concepts to get quick cash.

Quiet sad and disappointed reveal. I bought HoT without hesitation, but this one i’ll just ignore. Even the dev said there would be no progression so that means doing kitten that it isn’t rewarding.

They intentionally spent all of this time building systems that they could reuse so that they could churn out content quickly and effectively instead of always fumbling around like Zhaitan’s undead on the shores of Orr.

Those “old” things were removed because they didn’t work too well, so that they could be added back in at a later date when they were fixed!

Hannelore.8153:

They intentionally spent all of this time building systems that they could reuse so that they could churn out content quickly and effectively instead of always fumbling around like Zhaitan’s undead on the shores of Orr.

Those “old” things were removed because they didn’t work too well, so that they could be added back in at a later date when they were fixed!

I have no problem using old assets.

But for god sake, add a new mechanic! Something new! It is a new expansion! Even the glider used already existed mechanics! Not even the ley line mastery made any difference!

This has nothing to do with sales figures, it is just the general direction of the industry moving towards an ever greater level of digitalisation. The amount of sales likely lost from a lack of box sales is probably very few. Having worked in games retail, boxed expansions rarely sell well and retailers usually get fed up of leftover stock anyway.

As to the other comments, some of you guys want new mechanics and new progressions and many people want the company steer away from that very concept. Anet can’t please both camps, they have to make the decision based on the feedback and metrics we don’t see. I don’t like a lot of things that have been added or missed over the last few years, but it is way to early to criticise an expansion until at least we get to play it.

What do you mean no progression? There is 5 new maps to explore, new mastery lines, weapons, armours, and everything to collect.

The Mastery system is progression, and the elite skill specs to unlock.

Randulf.7614:

This has nothing to do with sales figures, it is just the general direction of the industry moving towards an ever greater level of digitalisation. The amount of sales likely lost from a lack of box sales is probably very few. Having worked in games retail, boxed expansions rarely sell well and retailers usually get fed up of leftover stock anyway.

As to the other comments, some of you guys want new mechanics and new progressions and many people want the company steer away from that very concept. Anet can’t please both camps, they have to make the decision based on the feedback and metrics we don’t see. I don’t like a lot of things that have been added or missed over the last few years, but it is way to early to criticise an expakittenil at least we get to play it.

First of all retail sales doesn’t work like that. World of Warcraft sells mostly only retail because fans want to keep the boxes of their favorite mmo franchise. For example i will not buy digital because it doesn’t feel right.

On you second paragraph you are mentioning that Anet can’t chose both camps. That is fales since FFXVI is doing just fine with both adding casul content and hardcore with gear progression. If Anet continues like this Guild Wars 2 will become like Asheron’s Call and die in 5 years from now.

Out of 150 online friends in gw2 only 3 of them are online. My old guild is the same as well but 300 people have years to log in. If that doesn’t tell you anything, you are in denial. Not you specifically but anyone who thinks like this.

John.8507:

What do you mean no progression? There is 5 new maps to explore, new mastery lines, weapons, armours, and everything to collect.

The Mastery system is progression, and the elite skill specs to unlock.

Feels like you missed half of the paragraph where i am saying “Unrewarding redundant stuff”. Not gonna play another 300 hours to be look good than get good.

Way too many assumptions in the OP for my taste. First of all, HoT probably didn’t do as well as expected, but everyone has different theories on why that is. More to the point, the decision not to go retail might have nothing to do with that at all, any more than stopping publishing stuff in cassette form and moving to CD had nothing to do with the popularity of a product. Brick and mortar stores tend to sell less and less computer games and more console games. That’s just how it is.

Well they said HoT didn’t do as expected. But that’s neither here or there. They lowered this expansion by 20$. We should all be happy at that.

Shortage.5427:

Randulf.7614:

This has nothing to do with sales figures, it is just the general direction of the industry moving towards an ever greater level of digitalisation. The amount of sales likely lost from a lack of box sales is probably very few. Having worked in games retail, boxed expansions rarely sell well and retailers usually get fed up of leftover stock anyway.

As to the other comments, some of you guys want new mechanics and new progressions and many people want the company steer away from that very concept. Anet can’t please both camps, they have to make the decision based on the feedback and metrics we don’t see. I don’t like a lot of things that have been added or missed over the last few years, but it is way to early to criticise an expakittenil at least we get to play it.

First of all retail sales doesn’t work like that. World of Warcraft sells mostly only retail because fans want to keep the boxes of their favorite mmo franchise. For example i will not buy digital because it doesn’t feel right..

Comparing much larger companies like Blizzard and SquareEnix who make many games and rely on grouping their games together in retail outlets for advertising purposes is a little different though. Anet make 1 game and do not have the budget to pay for the prominent space required to make it worth their while (this is something that happens in the UK and some areas of Europe). If they were to sell it exclusively on their site, that’s mostly crossing into the market who would just download anyway and there is additional expense of postage which is a non-trivial cost which would be factored in.

There will always be fans who want physical copies, but to be cost effective, Anet would have to have a large enough budget to mass produce, otherwise it’s an additional and unnecessary cost.

If a company does not make a box version, it is largely because they do not believe they will lose enough sales from not having them and in this day and age, such economic (and environmental from the extra plastic) concerns are pretty sensible for a business to make.

I am not unsympathetic to the rest of your concerns, I just don’t happen to agree with some of the conclusions. We’ll leave that to a mutual difference of opinion

Box sales are a form of advertisement and advertisement and marketing costs money even in this day and age plenty of games get physical versions for the purpose. The reason why you would exlude yourself from that is if the costs don’t equate your expectations.

Thus this expansion is keen on those who’ve played the game and not so much trying to entertain new players. For instance a release next month is fine and everything but its enough time to pull off a proper marketting campaign at all. They even gave an announcement for we the players to spread the game via word of mouth. They even went so far as to decouple an entire expansion something that simply isn’t done in this day and age because this new expansion is more about retention and HoT obviously had the opposite effect.

More or less their skimping on the ad fund for the expac which is common when the prior product didn’t pull the weight you expected.

I personally just don’t bother with box games for the PC anymore. Download to play is my thing. I also just download and play on the PS3 too, the only time I don’t there is when I happen to go into a store like GameStop and see something I want to try on clearance for something $4 or so.
I live full time in an RV (and have for about 7 yrs so far) and space is at a premium so if I don’t have to have a box then all the better. Honestly even if we move out of the RV back into a sticks & bricks place then I still would not want boxes everywhere. Too much clutter anymore is something I no longer want to deal with.

PyrateSilly.4710:

I personally just don’t bother with box games for the PC anymore. Download to play is my thing. I also just download and play on the PS3 too, the only time I don’t there is when I happen to go into a store like GameStop and see something I want to try on clearance for something $4 or so.
I live full time in an RV (and have for about 7 yrs so far) and space is at a premium so if I don’t have to have a box then all the better. Honestly even if we move out of the RV back into a sticks & bricks place then I still would not want boxes everywhere. Too much clutter anymore is something I no longer want to deal with.

I agree with you fully on this Pyrate Silly for me when they begun to put everything online and they came out with downloading software. that is when I stopped buying boxed stuff and going to retail stores all together my self . other then food stores mind you . case in point I need to go to my local game stop retailer to buy a blizzard card for a sever change lucky for me they had the cards but I noticed and ask if they had a pc game area . thinking of maybe picking up a old game for the cheap for the whim of it all .
that is when my local game stop told me they removed the pc area from the brick stores and now its all done online . and to me that makes since long as they carry the cards for games and so forth . thus so

I fully buy everything online and as well as software downloads these days too .and forgotten all about the mess of boxes I do not have any more to deal with

Shortage.5427:

Well if that isn’t a big slap to the people who think the game is still alive!

No retail means that their last expansion didn’t sell as much as they thought, which is obvious due to the lack of rewarding content!

The new expansion was a bigger slap in the face, with the biggest joke revenant using old warriors longbow skills and guardians old tomes. All i saw in the trailers was same, redundant assets. Not even new mechanics to embrace gameplay(Because we don’t want to get the casuls out of their comfort zone and earn something new), even the mounts seemed like the zephyrite fiasco all over(with the crystals 1,2,3,4 abilities on skillbar).

Pretty disappointed, i thought they were going to turn this around, but instead they just reuse old concepts to get quick cash.

Quiet sad and disappointed reveal. I bought HoT without hesitation, but this one i’ll just ignore. Even the dev said there would be no progression so that means doing kitten that it isn’t rewarding.

I actually work in retail and distribution, this is now actually the industry norm. Very little software is now being produced in the traditional hardcopy format that would allow for a retail release outside of digital content. Even video distribution is falling by the wayside as digital releases becomes more the standard. Physical distribution is expensive and means you have to freeze content in place to ship which then still relies on a connection to update for changes and fixes, so why create that extra expense. Don’t let the lack of a retail release impact your decision.

Aren’t Anet doing their own publishing now? Maybe they looked at the cost of getting boxed copies made and decided the money would be better spent elsewhere? (Like on other forms of advertising which are more likely to be effective.)

Normally I’m very much in favour of disc/boxed copies of games, but that’s mainly because I like to be able to go back to them whenever I want, whether that’s months or years or decades after release. If I uninstall it I want to be able to get it back without relying on the publisher choosing to keep it available. (Likewise I don’t like Steam and these other dressed up DRM systems that require you to seek permission from the publisher to load a game you’ve bought.)

But with an MMO that’s pointless – the game isn’t on the disc, it’s on the servers. If the servers shut down it doesn’t matter how many boxes or discs you’ve got, you can’t play it. So I don’t see the use in having a physical copy.

This is an older article but if you take a movie as fixed content where as games no longer are its even more impact-full:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jan/05/film-and-tv-streaming-and-downloads-overtake-dvd-sales-for-first-time-netflix-amazon-uk

Downsides of boxed copies:

1. They cost more to produce (disc, box, manual, etc. all need to be created and printed), plus you have to pay to ship them.
2. You charge less for them (so that the store can match your online price and still make a profit).
3. People can easily steal them.
4. Most stores don’t have PC game sections anymore, so the number of people buying them this way is tiny.

Upsides:

1. Nostalgia.

Progression isn’t just becoming more powerful. Advancing the story, the maps, and mechanics are also a form of progression.

And there are new mechanics. I’ve watched the announcement and vids on each of the new specializations. Maybe you need to watch those to see that there is more to this than what you think.

I work in marketing, not in the video game industry, but I keep tabs on all sorts of ships in the marketplace. Digital distribution has been, and will continue to be, the primary distribution method for PC games going forward. Heck, even pen and paper RPGs are being affected by this, with more and more sales occurring online for PDFs than in-store for paper copies. I have even been caught up in this trend as well, divesting myself of a lot of the, being honest, junk that I have laying around the house. This makes my wife happy and creates less dust collectors.

Shortage.5427:

John.8507:

What do you mean no progression? There is 5 new maps to explore, new mastery lines, weapons, armours, and everything to collect.

The Mastery system is progression, and the elite skill specs to unlock.

Feels like you missed half of the paragraph where i am saying “Unrewarding redundant stuff”. Not gonna play another 300 hours to be look good than get good.

“Get good,” as you put it is represented by the player increasing his skill level with a given character in the game. Its not about leaning on a crutch of power creep to pretend to be getting better. If a player spends, “300 hours,”, and doesnt, “get good,” or at least get better, at the the game then the problem might not be with the game.

TheGrimm.5624:

This is an older article but if you take a movie as fixed content where as games no longer are its even more impact-full:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jan/05/film-and-tv-streaming-and-downloads-overtake-dvd-sales-for-first-time-netflix-amazon-uk

Good you posted a really good reason to support net netraulity just now. Buy digital tax-free merch so that Anet gets the cash.

Shortage.5427:

…No retail means that their last expansion didn’t sell as much as they thought, which is obvious due to the lack of rewarding content!

Actually, I’d be more inclined to say that they didn’t need it advertised on shelves and that they have embraced the power of online advertising and technology in order to sell their product. Retail is dead.

PoF is on amazon.
It’s just a “blank” space but i guess this site will be updated.

If i remember correctly, same thing happened with HoT (box version) back then.