Some Time Later...

It's been some time after the release of Guild Wars 2 and updates are trickling into the gaming blog/news community.  Tobold had an interesting post regarding falling play numbers for GW2.

This is not a surprising result to me or many other people.  In today's game environment, new mmorpgs only have a small window of opportunity to make a mark.  GW2 attempts to keep this window open with their buy2play formula.  The company is, in essence, trying to recoup their expenditures as close to the front as possible.  Then glide on store purchases.

So at this point, a fall in the number of hours played are not a worry for GW2.  What would cause worry is a fall in store revenue.  Anet has not released any kind of serious financial health information on the game (except that it sold 2 million copies), so we can't tell if their store is a success or failure.

Since the game marketed itself as casual friendly and no subscription, the creators may have counted on the ebb and flow of players.  They released the game knowing that Blizzard was going to send out a big expansion (Pandaria) in the same time frame.  I feel they knew they would lose players to the biggest game in the industry.  The question is, how much did they plan around that fact?  Will Anet crumple into a heap much in the same way that SWTOR did when it flagged in numbers?

It is still too soon to tell.  As for me, my own hours in the game have flagged.  This is not due to falling interest in the game.  I still enjoy it.  But I find myself engaged in RL activities and I feel that is much healthier than loafing about in an mmorpg.

Also, for the record, I did not buy nor do I plan to buy Mists of Pandaria.  I'm taking a wait and see attitude toward WOW right now, especially since I felt burnt from the Cataclysm expansion.  The expansion I am thinking about buying is, crazy enough, RIFT's Storm Legion.