Guild Wars 2

Now I realize this has absolutely no bearing on us as players, but I was curious what happens to stores with the original copies of GW2 once HoT is released, given HoT will effectively make those copies completely worthless. Will retailers be exchanging their copies for box copies of HoT, are unactivated core serial keys automatically upgraded to HoT, or are retailers expected to eat the loss for holding outdated stock?

Perhaps, the retailers will sell them at a discounted price, for those players that only want the core game. Some people prefer to spend a little to try out an older part of a franchise, before purchasing the more current offerings. /shrug

They’re not completely worthless. They are still available as the game is still running. The game isn’t going F2P like Wildstar, so they’re not going to pull those versions. There are still those out there that would like to rather pay $20-30 to try the game’s core rather than spending $50 for the whole package of HoT. And no, they won’t automatically upgrade to HoT (that makes no logical sense at all because of the price difference).

Send retailers a bunch of stickers saying “Now includes expansion”.