Guild Wars 2

I mean just look at the decline in the new page likes on GW2’s Facebook. Over what, a day…since this all started. So tell me where are these new players going to come from?
Edit: the grey line is last weeks new page likes, and the blue is this weeks.

I’m not even mad at the expansion anymore. I am more amazed at the marketing/communications team at Arena Net. It doesn’t matter how big a company is (and ANET is probably on the smaller side comparatively) they are tied heavily to their consumers and weather or not they can keep them from going somewhere else. I mean there are programs that monitor community engagement in a variety of social media platforms, blogs forums etc and they pay people to monitor the community sentiment and develop plans to react to all situations. I’d love to see their communications strategy because they are doing a terrible job. Honestly….really bad.
Whoever in ANET that has said silence is an effective strategy for dealing with incredibly negative community feedback is an idiot. The longer they leave it, the longer it spreads until in every review there are comments putting new players off purchasing any version of the game. Why would they when they can go and buy elder scrolls online which is $60 on steam and is free to play, the same cost as the expansion and a character slot – and which is getting great reviews since it became ftp. Not to mention FFXIV.
How a company handles their consumers is also a great indication of how in touch they are with the market and how safe the brand will be in their hands. Not good at all. Any gaffs now are just going to result in more work down the track to make up any losses in profit which means longer wait before a release and on and on it goes.

First let’s look at advertisement. A large majority of the hype was built in-game from what can only be their existing player base. In my opinion expansions don’t really have the saleability of a stand-alone game. In this respect ANET is already starting on the back foot they are trying to market their game to people with the original game, but they know they need new players to continue to make desirable profits, hence the free game. The problem starts with the assumption that new-players would even be interested in pre-purchasing an expansion without information, reviews or anything of substance to convince them it’s worth the money. The only people willing to buy a pre-purchase edition of HoT would be people with prior experience i.e. existing players.

So if we look at the pricing, and leave out the free gw2 copy, one basic edition of HoT is US$50. If we use the base game as a unit then the Deluxe is 1.5 and the Ultimate is 2. They were assuming people would see the Deluxe and Ultimate packages as a good deal therefore making more from buyers.  So in their eyes 2 buyers could potential earn them twice the value of the base edition, if both went Ultimate. This would make up for, what I’m guessing is comparatively low sales of a pre-purchase version compared to the full release. But this relies on the buyer demographic – people who are willing to buy pre-release versions of a game – i.e. existing players. I might add that players are now more likely to begrudingly purchase a base version in protest of the insult to existing games.

New players are more likely to look at reviews, ratings, and posts by people playing the game to make their decisions – this all occurs after release. So onto my question; who is your marketing leader, and why the hell did they obliterate your chances of making decent money?