NCsoft released their 2014 Q2 financial report.
(http://www.ncsoft.net/global/ir/earnings.aspx)
GW2 generated about 25 million dollars in the last 3 months, a little bit less compared to Q1(30 million $), which is almost the same as 2013 Q4. I don’t have early figures about the whole 2013 fiscal year, but here I can come up with some financial status about GW2. Yes it remains stable, and is probably going to reach 100 million dollars at the end of 2014. I know YoY2013 is a little bit decreasing, but if u take a look at other major MMOs on the market (swtor, wildstar, eso, ff14). I have done some research on these MMOs (each game forum, 3rd party figures from mmorpg.com), every figure I saw told me GW2 surely has the largest player base among those MMOs, but nearly gets the lowest revenue(swtor get 150million in 2013, which has the smallest player base among those MMOs above).
Here are some thoughts about why it has gone this way. One thing must be the B2P model. GW2 is the only B2P game here, this surely won’t get as much as P2W and P2PØ at the beginning, but what comes after is the gemstore. As GW2 is not a P2W game, anet can’t put stat related stuff in the gemstore like other MMOs, but they can surely sell good looking skins, which they don’t. You can’t say black lion weapons are awesome nor armor skins from the “style” section in the gemstore. Some of them are even ugly. I believe this is the only MMO that I complain compay don’t sell enough on their real money in game market. This is weird, if I work as a product manager who develop few products that won’t match the needs of the customer, I would probably get fired many times already, and from the fiscal report we can see the most revenue anet got, was from gemstore transactions and new players (China launch is not included in 25million because it’s break down to loyalty revenue). Both of them are actually the same thing because people buy stuff from gemstore no matter if they are new or veterans.
Summary: Of all the mmos that was mentioned before, GW2 has largest player base, while making the lowest revenue (it’s still stable 2 years after launch which is good). Anet you really need to reconsider the stuff on gemstore and decide what to do next. Do it quickly.
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English isn’t my native language but I gave it a try.
(edited by XyAltAcc.2096)