After the first couple of months, the problem existed. Are you saying 3.5 years ago with the big launch there were more people playing at one time. Sure there were.
But then it’s normal to lose people over time as new games come out and the migrating masses move on.
While it true that games often have a spike and a drop at launch, but for a game to remain profitable, they need to continually grow their numbers, which means there should be more people playing today there there were 3 years ago, or even last year.
It’s actually very bad for the game if there were more players playing 3.5 years ago then there are today, that means the game is in declined. Which is.. well that means literally ‘the game is dying’ and while there is turnover, which gets people to claim the game is dying, in truth, what happens is while some people leave, more people join, so the population grows.
That is why some older guilds can feel vacant, and other guilds are bursting at the seams.
As such there should not be less people playing WvW today then there were 3.5 years ago, there should be more, which means there should have been no need for a merger.. yet there was.
Now that can be caused by two factors. The first being, there are in fact less people playing the game, or there are just less people playing WvW.
Given the numbers by NCsoft about GW2’s Earnings, which looked real good, it’s a safe bet that that there are just less people playing WvW, but more people playing the actual game.
What you’re saying here is patently untrue. I mean demonstrably untrue. You have outliers like WoW, who are the exception to almost every rule. I can’t think of very many MMOs, hardly any, that have more people playing three years after launch. It’s not only true of MMOs, but games in general and almost all entertainment and this is something I know well and intimately from business experience.
The most any form of entertainment will generally sell is in the first 30 days of it’s existence. That’s when the press is there. That’s when the launch is. That’s the big money influx. That’s the business. You work for five years to produce an MMO, you hope the launch pays for it, and then you hope to make profit moving forward. You don’t expect it to grow, because I can’t list five western MMOs that have grown after three years. Runescape and WoW maybe from the old old days which were far less competitive Eve Online. That’s about all I can think of. Everyone else went downhill fast. And they’re mostly still viable.
I mean you have Final Fantasy XIV which had a dreadful launch and managed to rebuild. You have SWToR and TSW who laid off stuff and when free to play. ESO isn’t a growing market. I’m not sure where you’re getting your information from but you might want to check some sources.
Most MMOs, the vast majority, exist off a group of loyal die hard fans and a few new players here and there to offset natural attrition. That’s how the industry works and how it’s almost always worked.
Again, exceptions are there, but they’re few and far between.
I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. If you did any study into the old successful MMO’s, you would have found it very easy to find 5 MMO’s that were rocking more people years later then at launch, all you had to do was look at all the widely successful ones.
Case in point, Everquest, their best year was in 2005, that was 6 years after launch, they had near 5 times the amount of subs then they did in their first year.
Just to List a Few:
- World of Warcraft
- Runescape
- Everquest
- EvE
- Ulitima Online
- Second Life
- Lord of the Rings Online
- Dungeons and Dragons Online
- Tibia
- Final Fantasy XI
- Lineage
- Starwars Galaxies
All of these games had more subs years after launch then they did at their start.
It was easy back in the day to chart MMO’s as they were mostly Sub Based, so, simply seeing their sub numbers was enough to see their growth. In today’s F2P, or in the case if GW2, B2P, it’s much harder to get absolute numbers of players.
But, think about this. Anet sold 2 Million copies at lunch in 2012, by 2015, (3 years) they sold 5 million copies. So they were selling around a million copies a year, since launch. They Mentioned that they reach 7 million Accounts when they went F2P with HoT. So that was another 2 Million account Jump, in 2016. That right there is more active accounts then they had at launch, because that was a 2 Million Jump in Accounts, along with all the existing players.
So, I have no idea where you subscribe for your insider gamer info, but, it’s simply not true for MMO’s. I would believe that Console Games are like that, since they are selling a completed game, movies, and other instant entertainment sources, sure, but MMO’s are built around longer term customer investment.
MMO’s, are like a TV series. The better they, the more people they attract over time.
First of all we’re talking about MMORPGs. Counting Second Life is completely silly for example. It’s a virtual world. It’s not even a game. Putting that down as an MMO RPG does a complete disservice to your entire argument. I also said western MMOs. Lineage didn’t do well three years after launch it failed here. Different markets always have different rules. Are you suggesting that Lineage as a western MMO was stronger 3 years after it launched here? Because it went out of business.
If you want to talk about asian MMOs, you can do that, but Anet is not an Asian company, and though it launched in China, it’s a western MMO, competing with other Western MMOs. I listed Eve and Runescape and WoW.
Do you notice how as we get further and further from ten years ago less and less MMOs make more profit? Because 10 years ago there was a lot less competition everything, was sub and there were no free to play MMORPGs.
Today’s climate is very very different, and these modern MMOs can’t play by the same rules.
SWToR can’t. ESO can’t. Archeage can’t. Rift couldn’t. TSW couldn’t. Guild Wars 2 couldn’t.
You can’t grow a business in this ecomony.
Even if you found 15 MMOs to use as an example, considering there are hundreds of MMOs they’re STILL outliers.
Considering you have to go back ten years for most examples, in an environment that changes quarterly, it the validity of what I’m saying.
Edit: Just to clarify you’re trying to make it a point that GW 2 is not growing. The market isn’t growing. The market is more divided and no one is growing. WOW isn’t growing it’s losing subs. They stopped reporting them. Eve isn’t growing.
As more and more people move from computer games to consoles, less and less people are around to play MMOs and there are more MMOs out there.
Pointing out this game isn’t growing doesn’t really say anything about the game’s relative success.
………… maybe it is inexpensive if you live in some rich country.
