Guild Wars 2

I feel if you Anet and the GW2 game was available on steam it would have create a lot more purchases of the game. I’d also like to have it as a official Steam related game so that I can monitor my play time and statistics about the game easily. Would also be nice if they did achievements in the game, since it would make me want to play more to get the steam achievements.

Just an idea…

Yours Sincerely,
A former GW2 player.

WTFmhlgaming.8924:

I feel if you Anet and the GW2 game was available on steam it would have create a lot more purchases of the game. I’d also like to have it as a official Steam related game so that I can monitor my play time and statistics about the game easily. Would also be nice if they did achievements in the game, since it would make me want to play more to get the steam achievements.

Just an idea…

Yours Sincerely,
A former GW2 player.

Well I so rarely place value on the comments of self proclaimed former players, especially if they have only a single post.
However the question is interesting enough since it does seem somewhat beneficial, no? Why wouldn’t ANet put GW2 on steam? Is there a cost? Would Valve want a big piece of the pie? Is Valve a bit restrictive?

Why don,t you just add gw 2 as a non steam gamein your steam list? You have a option for thay.Works fine for me to see my hours + i can always see a pop ups of my steam friends logging in gw 2 without looking in the guild.

We already have achievments in game. No need to add steam achievments…

Anet wouldn’t put Guild Wars 2 on steam because of the restrictions you have to abide by. Steam has a contract. Anet obviously would like more money. The two possiblities are that steam rejected selling Guild Wars 2 (something I find unlikely) or Anet found something in Steam’s policy that caused them to not list there.

It’s a no brainer to list if you don’t have a reason not to.

Franklin Fhenrir.4962:

Why don,t you just add gw 2 as a non steam gamein your steam list? You have a option for thay.Works fine for me to see my hours + i can always see a pop ups of my steam friends logging in gw 2 without looking in the guild.

We already have achievments in game. No need to add steam achievments…

Huh, I’ve done the same thing, but it doesn’t show me my number of hours, just last time I played. I would prefer it to be an actual game on steam, but as an added non-steam game it has worked well enough for me.

@Vayne
Your response makes absolutely no sense…

As it stands, Guild Wars GotY, Factions, Nightfall and EotN are available on Steam. I’ve tried to hash out a number of reasons why GW2 hasn’t popped on Steam, but each possibility proves itself wrong.

I must state one thing, however: I would hope that existing owners would be allowed to activate their keys on Steam (unlike how GW1 is cuurrently implemented), or at the very least make the client free since login would still be required.

Steam is owned by another game publisher not NCSoft. Why would that other publisher allow GW2 onto steam? It might make GW2 more popular than any of Valve’s games……

I got myself The Secret World and Rift from Steam on a sale, I would never bought them if they were not on Steam, because I wouldnt want to pay 50€ for games with several years on their backs and I didn’t know when they did sales.
Anyways there won’t ever be a huge stream of new players on GW2 unless they put the game on Steam and let people know it, but if they are greedy with the Gemstore, well… their loss.

Hekdragoon.1972:

I got myself The Secret World and Rift from Steam on a sale, I would never bought them if they were not on Steam, because I wouldnt want to pay 50€ for games with several years on their backs and I didn’t know when they did sales.
Anyways there won’t ever be a huge stream of new players on GW2 unless they put the game on Steam and let people know it, but if they are greedy with the Gemstore, well… their loss.

How do you know? With GW1, every time a new book came out, Factions and Nightfall, there was an influx of players. TSW and Rift are very mediocre games and they are P2W as as you can buy very high end armors with RL money only (or grind for them) and be ‘Uber’ in those games. The Gemstore in GW2 greedy? LOL – I guess Rift’s and TSW’s CS are not – OH well. I can see you have a slant – they are all greedy. Why not? They need to make money to continue on (and they are FOR PROFIT COMPANIES), denying that is funny to me.

I have never bought a game off of Steam, nor will I but, that is me.

Steam takes a cut of every microtransaction made with real cash . Right now gw2 has enough players to probably make it counter-beneficial for a steam release.

A few years in the future, with the big “next-gen” mmos being released ( archage, everquest next etc ) and the population going down, that might probably change, in the same way as gw1 was released on steam near the end of its life cycle, to inject some fresh blood in it.

Also keep in mind that steam also takes a while to upload patches after a dev released them, so hot-fixing would be harder.

Dusty Moon.4382:

Steam is owned by another game publisher not NCSoft. Why would that other publisher allow GW2 onto steam? It might make GW2 more popular than any of Valve’s games……

Thats also true for 99.9% of the games on steam. They all have their own publisher, being on steam has nothing to do with it. Also, valve doesn’t care about popularity, the more a game is played, the more people have to open steam and get exposed to the storefront in order to play it (keep in mind steam usually has 7-7.5 MILLIONS people logged in, getting daily exposure to the sales/new releases)

But even if it was the case, i really doubt ANYONE can beat dota2 and its 750.000 concurrent players at non-peak hours ( for comparison, call of duty series, which is probably far more popular then gw2, hardly hits 10k players with its most played titles)

I play mostly 1-2 games, yet i have a library of 640 games on steam, 90% of which i never even installed (basically free cash for the devs/valve). That’s the power of steam sales

Steam is typically employed by companies that can not or choose to not distribute their software on their own. Adding more complexity into a supply chain usually creates additional issues when deploying updates. The cost to use the Steam service could better be used else where.

TheGrimm.5624:

Steam is typically employed by companies that can not or choose to not distribute their software on their own.

right, like activision, EA, rockstar, 2k, capcom, WB, sony, ubisoft, square/enix, bathesda etc
http://store.steampowered.com/browse/publishers.

They all have their own distribution chains, digital platforms ( ubi/ea) and deals with physical retailers.
Being on steam makes them lose about 30-40% of income, but the exposure and copies sold, especially for tripleA with alot of advertising, is many times higher to make up for it.

Also, that loss of income is not “real” as offloading brandwidht costs to valve, cutting out the stores and third-party local distributors as well as not having to bother with printing and shipping physical copies is a HUGE deal

Dusty Moon.4382:

Steam is owned by another game publisher not NCSoft. Why would that other publisher allow GW2 onto steam? It might make GW2 more popular than any of Valve’s games……

lol if you think this game is that popular…
Majority of popular steam games are FPS, some strategy games like civ 5, some RPGs like bdl2, skyrim, etc…

GW2 would be pretty low on the list of steams concurrent players haha, this game would hardly be popular.

In terms of concurrent players, I highly doubt GW2 even beats runescape lol

SkiTz.4590:

Dusty Moon.4382:

Steam is owned by another game publisher not NCSoft. Why would that other publisher allow GW2 onto steam? It might make GW2 more popular than any of Valve’s games……

lol if you think this game is that popular…
Majority of popular steam games are FPS, some strategy games like civ 5, some RPGs like bdl2, skyrim, etc…

GW2 would be pretty low on the list of steams concurrent players haha, this game would hardly be popular.

In terms of concurrent players, I highly doubt GW2 even beats runescape lol

I am sure it does (80K based on Reddit – I am sure GW2 has more than that just in China alone) …. if you play Runescape more power to ya – I played it and was bored silly.

Dusty Moon.4382:

SkiTz.4590:

Dusty Moon.4382:

Steam is owned by another game publisher not NCSoft. Why would that other publisher allow GW2 onto steam? It might make GW2 more popular than any of Valve’s games……

lol if you think this game is that popular…
Majority of popular steam games are FPS, some strategy games like civ 5, some RPGs like bdl2, skyrim, etc…

GW2 would be pretty low on the list of steams concurrent players haha, this game would hardly be popular.

In terms of concurrent players, I highly doubt GW2 even beats runescape lol

I am sure it does (80K based on Reddit – I am sure GW2 has more than that just in China alone) …. if you play Runescape more power to ya – I played it and was bored silly.

How many people have subscribed on reddit does not mean concurrent players…
And yea china probably, but I’m talking just EU+NA

Azure Fang.8605:

@Vayne
Your response makes absolutely no sense…

As it stands, Guild Wars GotY, Factions, Nightfall and EotN are available on Steam. I’ve tried to hash out a number of reasons why GW2 hasn’t popped on Steam, but each possibility proves itself wrong.

I must state one thing, however: I would hope that existing owners would be allowed to activate their keys on Steam (unlike how GW1 is cuurrently implemented), or at the very least make the client free since login would still be required.

Actually makes sense considering it’s basically what anet said before release. I’ll try to find the actual quote and post it.

EDIT: found it:

Originally Posted by Mike O’Brien, President and Founder of ArenaNet
No, it almost certainly won’t be on Steam. Valve has some new business terms will keep almost all new MMOs off Steam.

Keep in mind the GW2 client is free to download from our web site and has no copy protection. (And if it’s really important, you can add non-Steam games to your Steam library.)

Taken from here, they don’t give source but I remember reading it elsewhere before release: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2745308&highlight=guild+wars

So, basically it’s because of some change to the business term that took place after GW1 was already there.

Hekdragoon.1972:

I got myself The Secret World and Rift from Steam on a sale, I would never bought them if they were not on Steam, because I wouldnt want to pay 50€ for games with several years on their backs and I didn’t know when they did sales.
Anyways there won’t ever be a huge stream of new players on GW2 unless they put the game on Steam and let people know it, but if they are greedy with the Gemstore, well… their loss.

i bought games cheaper then from steam, i already can’t stand steam so why should i bother with it if it’s not needed…..

There would be no benefit to NCSoft/ArenaNet for using Steam as a distribution platform.

This isn’t a single player game with a multiplayer add on, so the majority of the benefits of Steam immediately disappear. Considering Valve would also be taking 30% of the revenue and providing no benefit, there is no reason for GW2 to be on Steam at this time.

Now, years from now when GW3 is out and GW2 is an antique, sure, distribution via Steam means that NCSoft will occasionally get some revenue from the game without having to expend effort maintaining the distribution channel.

I don’t care if it on Steam as long as I don’t need Steam installed to play it. I had it for another game and got so fed up with the constant updating which seemed to take forever when I started my computer I gave up and uninstalled it and the game ended up abandoned.