Why GW2 Releases Content The Way It Does

Why GW2 Releases Content The Way It Does

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Posted by: Malkavian.3751

Malkavian.3751

Anytime you wonder why a business makes a decision: simply be reminded that the ultimate goal of any business is to make money.

A lot of people on the forums have been clamoring for large permanent patches with new places to explore. For example, opening up one of the unexplored areas of the map and having us fight a new elder dragon.

Under GW2’s current financial model, this will never happen. GW2 makes money primarily through the use of gem purchases at the moment, not subscriptions. Under a subscription model, developers make money by people playing the game. GW2 doesn’t make money from people just playing the game, they make money from gem purchases.

As a result, we see things like:

  • Biweekly content that takes little time to develop, and thus is often lacking in various departments.
  • Lots of festivals/celebrations with a focus on “silly”, enabling them to create a lot of gem purchases (skins, pets, etc..): Halloween x2, WintersDay x2, Queen’s Jubilee’s, Dragon Bash, Super Adventure Box x2.
  • Vertical progression with ascended items despite it contradicting their original philosophy. New set of ugly looking gear = more gem purchases for transmute stones.
  • Lots of RNG. < 1% chance for a an item by buying this thing for gems (dye packs, black lion chests, southsun, etc). There’s a reason why casinos make so much money
  • Very slow PvP and WvW content development. They don’t make money by developing this kind of content, they make money from biweekly PvE stuff.

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Posted by: Galphar.3901

Galphar.3901

A-Net releases the content the way they do because of one factor and one alone: NCSoft. NCSoft has turned this game into another Korean Grinder like all of their other games.

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Posted by: Bagel.4598

Bagel.4598

Anytime you wonder why a business makes a decision: simply be reminded that the ultimate goal of any business is to make money.

A lot of people on the forums have been clamoring for large permanent patches with new places to explore. For example, opening up one of the unexplored areas of the map and having us fight a new elder dragon.

Under GW2’s current financial model, this will never happen. GW2 makes money primarily through the use of gem purchases at the moment, not subscriptions. Under a subscription model, developers make money by people playing the game. GW2 doesn’t make money from people just playing the game, they make money from gem purchases.

As a result, we see things like:

  • Biweekly content that takes little time to develop, and thus is often lacking in various departments.
  • Lots of festivals/celebrations with a focus on “silly”, enabling them to create a lot of gem purchases (skins, pets, etc..): Halloween x2, WintersDay x2, Queen’s Jubilee’s, Dragon Bash, Super Adventure Box x2.
  • Vertical progression with ascended items despite it contradicting their original philosophy. New set of ugly looking gear = more gem purchases for transmute stones.
  • Lots of RNG. < 1% chance for a an item by buying this thing for gems (dye packs, black lion chests, southsun, etc). There’s a reason why casinos make so much money
  • Very slow PvP and WvW content development. They don’t make money by developing this kind of content, they make money from biweekly PvE stuff.

“Anytime you wonder why a business makes a decision: simply be reminded that the ultimate goal of any business is to make money.”

I stopped here.
The ultimate goal of a business is to expand. To expand you must at least break even, including paycheques and expenditures, then you must make profit.
If you do not have a good product or service you do not have a good customer base.
If you do not have a good customer base you will not make profit and you will not expand.
Poorly treating your customers will make them leave and go to a different business and without them, you have no sales. It doesn’t matter what you put on sale.

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Posted by: Malkavian.3751

Malkavian.3751

The ultimate goal of a business is to expand.

I stopped here.

Expanding is a possible method of making money, but not the primary goal in of itself. No business expands just for the sake of expanding: they expand to make money.

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Posted by: Jovel.5706

Jovel.5706

The first Guild Wars game was a CORPG that also didn’t have a subscription fee, also had a cash shop, and still released expansions/new campaigns as a way to earn money.

It’s not the B2P model, it’s the people managing it.

Crystin Cox is ArenaNet’s current Lead Monetization Producer since March, 2012. Has past experience at Nexon and NCSoft. Changed dyes from account bound to character bound during that time too, pre-launch.

Kristen Bornemann is ArenaNet’s current Head Development Director since August, 2012. Has past experience as a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft Game Studios. Also has experience at WB Games.

These people never worked on GW1, that explains a lot. Not factoring in the 2/3 founders that left ArenaNet on 2009 and 2010 (Patrick Wyatt and Jeff Strain), it’s clearly how the game is being managed and not the B2P model itself.

There’s probably more factors to add in towards ArenaNet’s shift in philosophy, but throwing quality out the window over quantity is not the correct decision in my personal opinion, especially to increase sales.

Attachments:

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Posted by: Beldin.5498

Beldin.5498

Under GW2’s current financial model, this will never happen. GW2 makes money primarily through the use of gem purchases at the moment, not subscriptions. Under a subscription model, developers make money by people playing the game. GW2 doesn’t make money from people just playing the game, they make money from gem purchases.

Under a subscription model they make money from people sell the subscription. The less these people play the more money they make, since they cost less bandwith and server ressources. People can pay subscription for months without ever logging in to the game and play. And i know quite some people who had their subscribtons still running for a half year or longer after they stopped playing.

Now under a shop based model people who don’t login to the game won’t buy anything.

EVERY MMO is awesome until it is released then its unfinished. A month after release it just sucks.
Best MMOs are the ones that never make it. Therefore Stargate Online wins.

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Posted by: Bagel.4598

Bagel.4598

The ultimate goal of a business is to expand.

I stopped here.

Expanding is a possible method of making money, but not the primary goal in of itself. No business expands just for the sake of expanding: they expand to make money.

A business does not simply want to make money, they want to make money exponentially.
The only way for that to happen is to grow, gather more customers, offer more services and charge more for these services.
A business can make money and call it a day.
A successful business will expand and make more money EACH day.
ArenaNet is descending due to a loss in customers. They need to expand, that is, they need more customers.

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Posted by: Zanshin.5379

Zanshin.5379

They’re not gonna make more customers by releasing bland living stories.

The reason for the rushed bi-weekly living stories, ascended gear, etc… is to keep the players they already have. Keep them in the game to eventually have them spend money. That’s why we have dailies, monthlies, time gated crafting, time gated rewards and RNG.

If they wanted more customers, they’d have to do something BIG.

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Posted by: Bagel.4598

Bagel.4598

They’re not gonna make more customers by releasing bland living stories.

The reason for the rushed bi-weekly living stories, ascended gear, etc… is to keep the players they already have. Keep them in the game to eventually have them spend money. That’s why we have dailies, monthlies, time gated crafting, time gated rewards and RNG.

If they wanted more customers, they’d have to do something BIG.

I think you are partly right.
I think what they have done is a nice idea, I think their execution has been bad.
They do need to keep the players they have but they are not going to do that by using vertical progression and destroying content that exists already (Fractals).
They need to keep to their promises.
They had the fan base, based on what they said they would do and they are losing the fan base because they are changing direction.
But it’s because the direction they are now turning to is not very good or well thought out that not only are they losing players, they are getting bad rep to new would-be customers.

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Posted by: Immensus.9732

Immensus.9732

yeah thats why P2P works better and thats why it also failed many times, ecause when you pay 15$ per month you expect awesome content that will entertain you for hours and you wont get bored of it, and thats the primary target of these Devs that have that type of MMO, when meanwhile the b2p focuses on how to advertise and attract players to the in game cash shop

Mesmers Shall Rule Tyria!

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Posted by: Scourge.4317

Scourge.4317

The first Guild Wars game was a CORPG that also didn’t have a subscription fee, also had a cash shop, and still released expansions/new campaigns as a way to earn money.

It’s not the B2P model, it’s the people managing it.

Crystin Cox is ArenaNet’s current Lead Monetization Producer since March, 2012. Has past experience at Nexon and NCSoft. Changed dyes from account bound to character bound during that time too, pre-launch.

Kristen Bornemann is ArenaNet’s current Head Development Director since August, 2012. Has past experience as a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft Game Studios. Also has experience at WB Games.

These people never worked on GW1, that explains a lot. Not factoring in the 2/3 founders that left ArenaNet on 2009 and 2010 (Patrick Wyatt and Jeff Strain), it’s clearly how the game is being managed and not the B2P model itself.

There’s probably more factors to add in towards ArenaNet’s shift in philosophy, but throwing quality out the window over quantity is not the correct decision in my personal opinion, especially to increase sales.

What…..why. I’m sure shes not the ONLY one calling the shots right? :*(

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Posted by: Behellagh.1468

Behellagh.1468

MMO players, the hardcore variety, burn through content faster than a SimCity firestorm. Then what usually happens is they play for a bit more and then move on to something else that’s new, returning for the next expansion. This is bad for both subscription and cash shop based games.

ANet’s approach is to release something new every two weeks lasting four. Sure the hardcorers burn though it in hours (unless some goal is timegated) instead of days or weeks but it’s something new. Some goes with the cash shop. New items, returning items, sales. The whole idea is to eliminate what would be months of stale content between expansions where the active population decays away, with hope they will all return when the expansion is released. Idea here is there’s not as much time to have boredom set in until there is something new to do, even if it only takes a dedicated player a day or two to do.

And duh, every company wants to make money. That’s it’s purpose. However it’s the really dumb ones that think they must continually expand, especially in an already saturated market with one dominate player. You carve out a niche, put up your flag and defend your little piece of the MMO universe as best as you can. You do that by giving players something unique, something not found in another game or the 800 lbs beast.

The problem with seeking approval of the masses is you lose your core players, the ones first attracted to the game because of what made it unique. The “masses” are a fickle bunch with short attention spans. They will flitter off when the next new shinny MMO comes along while your core will remain, as long as you didn’t lose whatever attracted the core in the first place while you were trying to appeal to the masses.

GW was a B2P, you bought it and you played for free and it had a cash shop. What it also had were expanshalones, expansions that could be played as a stand alone game that was in simplest terms a reskin of the original game. Different part of the world, different armors, slightly different professions, etc but the core game engine was the same. Except for the last expansion that bridged to GW2, that was a true expansion.

GW2 has earned more money in the first 7 months than GW made in 7 years. That doesn’t mean it’s as successful as a game, only time will tell if it was a flash in a pan. But as long as they keep the players with the open wallets happy and returning, it’ll be a success to those in charge. GW2 may not have what you thought that made GW unique but that’s of little consequence. As long as the game is pulling in $20 million a quarter, it’s a success.

We are heroes. This is what we do!

RIP City of Heroes

(edited by Behellagh.1468)

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Posted by: Xae Isareth.1364

Xae Isareth.1364

The way it happened was that they had this grand and fabulous idea of creating a constantly changing world with a plot which evolves around you, something which no other MMO has achieved.

But then they fell far short of that because, as mentioned, no one has achieved it so no one knew how. So we ended up with this crud.

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Posted by: Moderator.6837

Moderator.6837

Hello,

As this thread is not contributing to the current issues and concerns, it is now closed.

Thank you for your understanding.