Guild Wars 2

Just curious as to how long this game is expected to last. I got a meaningful 6 years out of GW1, and I know it still runs today, but with no content for years, it’s obviously just running on fumes.

Have Anet given a predicted timeline to the lifespan of GW2? Cos unless some revolutionary MMO comes out in the enxt 5 years, I am done with MMO’s once GW2 turns off its servers.

When it stops making money. Keep in mind, like you said, Guild Wars 1 is still up and running. Given that circumstance, I’ll guess no time soon.

Did Anet give a predicted timeline to the lifespan of GW1?

No way to predict really. Some MMOs run on for 10+ years. I’ve never heard of or read anything to the effect that ArenaNet has set an expiration date for their game. I don’t think they’ve mentioned a GW3 even. It’s one of those “We’ll get there when we get there” kind of things.

DaikonSamurai.6714:

Did Anet give a predicted timeline to the lifespan of GW1?

Yeah, they said about 6 to 8 weeks.

In all seriousness as long as it keeps making money, gw2 will keep going. Developing an MMO from the ground up is very expensive.

Although the sales of HOT obviously aren’t good and they even made the base game F2P so its not hard to tell they aren’t doing to well ATM.

wrathmagik.3518:

DaikonSamurai.6714:

Did Anet give a predicted timeline to the lifespan of GW1?

Yeah, they said about 6 to 8 weeks.

In all seriousness as long as it keeps making money, gw2 will keep going. Developing an MMO from the ground up is very expensive.

Although the sales of HOT obviously aren’t good and they even made the base game F2P so its not hard to tell they aren’t doing to well ATM.

GW2 makes most of it’s money from the gem store, so as long as they keep putting items in there that people will buy, they’ll keep making money. If they stop adding things to the gem store, I’d start to worry then.

wrathmagik.3518:

DaikonSamurai.6714:

Did Anet give a predicted timeline to the lifespan of GW1?

Yeah, they said about 6 to 8 weeks.

In all seriousness as long as it keeps making money, gw2 will keep going. Developing an MMO from the ground up is very expensive.

Although the sales of HOT obviously aren’t good and they even made the base game F2P so its not hard to tell they aren’t doing to well ATM.

The sales of HoT were fine — the upgrades from F2P to HoT were less than predicted, which is not the same. (Obviously, that’s still not ‘good’, but neither is it ‘bad’ as many are saying.)

When they made GW1, they seemed to have intended to keep updating it with new campaigns and/or expansions. On the drawing board: GW Utopia, which turned out to require too many mechanics changes to fit into the same game, which is when they decided to work on GW2. We didn’t hear about that for a while.

So, I’d guess that GW2 was designed to last indefinitely, that it would be extensible enough for one-off events and living world updates (and/or expansions, if that was how the wind blew). And that, like GW1, it will reach a point where it can’t support the next set of ideas from ANet, at which point, they’ll start working on GW3. (Unless, of course, something more dramatic happens, in which case it’s anybody’s guess.)

For me, until Camelot Unchained is playable.

wrathmagik.3518:

DaikonSamurai.6714:

Did Anet give a predicted timeline to the lifespan of GW1?

Yeah, they said about 6 to 8 weeks.

Heh, then expect them to give a lifespan timeline 6-8 weeks from it’s death.

Celtic Lady.3729:

No way to predict really. Some MMOs run on for 10+ years. I’ve never heard of or read anything to the effect that ArenaNet has set an expiration date for their game. I don’t think they’ve mentioned a GW3 even. It’s one of those “We’ll get there when we get there” kind of things.

but there is an expac 2 confirmed, so you’ve got that to look forward to after LWS3, so probably in 18 months or so I’d estimate, and, the way I see it, gw2 is easily the best mmo I’ve ever played, and there are plenty of mmo’s that’ve started in say 01-04 and still run today, as long as they keep doing what they’re doing I expect gw2 to last a very very long time.

with the microtransactions they have going, I’m sure the game is incredibly profitable, I’ve probably spent more on gw2 than any other single game… rivaling even dota 2 maybe.

No company is going to give an “estimated lifespan” unless they’re shuttering in the next few months and need to give players notice. To say, “We expect our MMO to last ~7 years and then peter out” would just be stupid business practice.

They’re just going to play it by ear, for as long as the game can support itself. That’s all the can do.

Barring any drastic occurences, I suspect things will start to peter out in the next three years.

HoT is what killed it for me. i did play a little bit after it but for me just turned into a Korean style grind game. loved all 7 years of gw1 but gw2 changed way to much :/

I think most serious MMO developers create games without any kind of definite end date in mind, expecting that if all goes well it will keep running for many years. (Some of the earliest examples of the genre like Ultima Online are actually still going after almost 20 years.)

Which isn’t to say that’s guaranteed. A lot can happen in 20 years (or 10, or 5, or 2).

Apparently they built GW2 with the problems they ran into in GW1 in mind – so everything including the engine was built to be upgradable as time went on so they could add new mechanics (or simply update things) and I suspect that might be part of the reason they went for a more artistic, less realistic style for the graphics – those kind of games tend to age better because they’re less affected by advances in technology.

But there are other things that could happen. Maybe they’ll decide they want to go in a new direction – develop a space exploration game instead, maybe people will follow through on their threats to leave and the game will actually become unprofitable, maybe it’ll be so profitable Anet (or rather NCSoft) get an offer they can refuse from a bigger company who will then end up ruining the game. Maybe certain companies will get their wish and we’ll all abandon PCs in favour of tablets and computer watches and have to settle for basic touch screen games.

Maybe the zombie apocalypse will happen and we’ll all be so busy surviving the kids won’t believe we ever had time to sit around and pretend to be fighting off hordes of zombies on the computer.

(Edit because ‘sit on our kittens’ sounded more wrong than the original.)

Guild Wars 2 will shut down at some point between now and the death of the human race.

2013 -> HoT.

Games ded, people just to realize it yet…

I mean – even the dev’s don’t post much on their own forum. They go to reddit…

BrotherBelial.3094:

Guild Wars 2 will shut down at some point between now and the death of the human race.

Or the heat death of the universe (whichever comes first).

Redenaz.8631:

No company is going to give an “estimated lifespan” unless they’re shuttering in the next few months and need to give players notice. To say, “We expect our MMO to last ~7 years and then peter out” would just be stupid business practice.

They’re just going to play it by ear, for as long as the game can support itself. That’s all the can do.

This right here ^^^

There is no expected livespan, so far basically only a pregiven one, what you can think about as some kindo of livespan which Anet has thought ahead for this game when you look at the birthday achievements with Anet having implemented maximum 10 ranks for 10 years old Characters, instead of adding a mechanic there, which doesn’t need pregiven achievement ranks, but instead just automatically adds every years +1 by itself

SO I think when Anet started designing this Game, that thought ahead of doing content and support for this game for at least 10 years and that is kind of I guess also a realistic value for a game with like this kind of scope like GW2 and its development time it eats..

Just look how long it took them to bring out HoT to continue the games story by lettign us finalyl defeat another dragon…. and theres STILL 4 TO KILL….
Now multiply the time it took to develop HoT by 4 and by that time we have easily already a 10 year old+ GW2 and still surely won’t have seen ever until this point again anythign of Cantha or Elona at all … what is really disappointing just to think about …. but thats a different topic …

Once an MMO hits a certain point, it tends to sustain itself pretty well, regardless of population drops. GW1 showed that.

Look at Anarchy Online – approaching its 15th anniversary and still not only hanging on with a tiny population, but has been adding new areas, instances, quests over the past few months! But for maybe 6 years it was devoid of anything and yet it remains Funcoms steadiest ship and has done despite flushing money into Lego and TSW.

Lotro – suffered horribly at the hands of GW2 and TESO in terms of losing players as people leave to find more modern gameplay for their fantasy needs. Yet, despite everything, it is now up to 9 years and on the brink of Mordor. And it still has horrible technical issues and dull, outdated gameplay, with treadmill grinds

Age of Conan. I’m baffled how this is still going, yet 8 years on, this dated and clunky fantasy MMO still carries on somehow.

GW2 is pretty resilient to lose direction and focus so dramatically after release and still retain a strong following. It certainly has many, many years in it, although how it will expand and not divide the population is a mystery to me, but it has a long journey ahead of it.

Orpheal.8263:

There is no expected livespan, so far basically only a pregiven one, what you can think about as some kindo of livespan which Anet has thought ahead for this game when you look at the birthday achievements with Anet having implemented maximum 10 ranks for 10 years old Characters, instead of adding a mechanic there, which doesn’t need pregiven achievement ranks, but instead just automatically adds every years +1 by itself

That date is almost certainly in there just because it was quicker and easier to do it that way. A lot of achievements have a fixed number of ranks so all the tech was already there and they just needed to make another one. When it’s about to run out they’ll just need to edit the number of ranks, or create a new achievement to follow on from it.

Whereas a system that updates itself with new ranks every year would have to be created especially for this one achievement, and the end result would look exactly the same to players so there’s no justification for spending the extra time and effort to build it.

(We have a similar system at work – various temporary bits of our website are set to expire on 31st December 2050. There’s nothing special about that date except it’s a long time off, everything that uses it is manually updated regularly so it doesn’t matter but the system we use requires an expiry date so we have to put one in.)

Mitch.4781:

Just curious as to how long this game is expected to last. I got a meaningful 6 years out of GW1, and I know it still runs today, but with no content for years, it’s obviously just running on fumes.

Have Anet given a predicted timeline to the lifespan of GW2? Cos unless some revolutionary MMO comes out in the enxt 5 years, I am done with MMO’s once GW2 turns off its servers.

if you listen to some people, the game’s been dead since it started. Anet haven’t said anything about a lifespan expectancy though.

me, I’d guess it would at least be after all the dragons are gone, and then they’d probably still keep the servers going like with GW1.

Depends on what is in tomorrow’s patch.

Khisanth.2948:

Depends on what is in tomorrow’s patch.

I can give you a sneak preview of one patch note now, if you want.

“Fixed a server crash.”

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Khisanth.2948:

Depends on what is in tomorrow’s patch.

I can give you a sneak preview of one parch note now, if you want.

“Fixed a server crash.”

Not “Fixed server closing despite being 90% done with the meta event.”?

Given GW1 is 11 yrs and still rocking the same will probably be for GW2. Those of us who were actually around for 2005 GW1 through today will still be kicking in the games as well. GAME ON!!!!