Guild Wars 2

The more videos I see the slicker the game looks. The special effects, animation, general atmosphere and design looks great for a high fantasy MMO.
 
Where is the footage with the fire breathing cyclops boss in that last video from?

That thing looks absolutely brilliant A++++++!!!!
 
bhavv said:
Server costs for Arenanet have NEVER been an issue.
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Server costs are always an issue, what Arenanet did was discover that SUPPORT costs were the money sink, and built a game around not having to run a massive Support department doing a bunch of manual housework.
 
sldsmkd said:
Server costs are always an issue, what Arenanet did was discover that SUPPORT costs were the money sink, and built a game around not having to run a massive Support department doing a bunch of manual housework.
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NO THEY ARENT!

Watch the last video posted. Server costs are an insignificant spec on the total cost of running NCSofts games.

Arenanet havnt reduced the quality of their support than any other game, to suggest that is the reason why games are FTP is a joke.

Quote from Jeff Strain:

Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true – you know it, and they know it. Gamers may buy the argument that your MMO requires a subscription fee, if you can tell them what they are getting for their money. This is the legacy of games like Guild Wars, Maple Story, and Silkroad Online, all of which introduced new business models into the MMO genre and were quite successful. The subscription model is still perfectly viable, but the pain threshold is very low now. It's no secret that gamers don't want to pay a subscription fee. If you can convince them that your game offers enough value to justify it, more power to you! But be prepared to defend your decision, often and loudly, and back it up over the lifetime of your game.

Be very aware of the choice you are asking players to make, and the frequency of that choice. In a subscription model you are asking players to make a choice every month, and it is a fairly drastic choice: Stay married, or get divorced? It is certainly the case that if every player decides to stay married every month, you can make more money from each player in the subscription model. But that will rarely be the case, and not something that you should count on. Every month, some percentage of your player base will decide on divorce, and as with marriage in the real word, once you are divorced you rarely get married to the same person again. If you go the subscription route, you'll need to have the confidence that your marriage rate will exceed your divorce rate.

With Guild Wars we ask players to make a choice only one time, and that choice is whether to buy the game, or not to buy the game. While we don't enjoy a recurring revenue stream each month, we do benefit from the fact that most Guild Wars players come back to the game when we release new content, so we are less concerned about players putting the game down for a few months. Players don't have to decide whether to stay married or get divorced, they just have to decide whether they want to play today or not. Beyond the benefit of a lower pain threshold to get into the game, this is the core strength of the Guild Wars business model, and one of the reasons it continues to thrive when many other subscription-based MMOs are struggling.

- Jeff Strain
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Many other Anet developers, and both their CMs have stated many time of the forums that their server costs are significantly cheaper to maintain than other MMOs are, and they do not actually need to charge any extra money or rely on transactions for their upkeep.
 
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bhavv said:
NO THEY ARENT!
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YES THEY ARE!

Bandwidth, Servers, Admins are not Free. What Anet did was heavily optimise the people costs of supporting that so that the cost of running that stuff < less than revenue from shifting boxes. They aggressively optimised the netwrok and server load and made the game so that the support offering could be stripped to the bone (because it wasn't needed).

Read the Edge interview.
 
What I don't get with them is how they are still in business, they've sold 6.5 million copies of GW or it's expansions and lets be generous and say the average revenue is $20 a box (which is very generous) - so that's what $130 million income.

The GW2 team is 270 strong, and assuming an average of $50k a year (again generous) - thats a burn rate of $13.5 million a year for the last 5 years so $67.5 million on staffing alone.

The margins must be tight and they must need to get GW2 out of the door soon and it has to be a hit.
 
sldsmkd said:
What I don't get with them is how they are still in business, they've sold 6.5 million copies of GW or it's expansions and lets be generous and say the average revenue is $20 a box (which is very generous) - so that's what $130 million income.

The GW2 team is 270 strong, and assuming an average of $50k a year (again generous) - thats a burn rate of $13.5 million a year for the last 5 years so $67.5 million on staffing alone.

The margins must be tight and they must need to get GW2 out of the door soon and it has to be a hit.
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Because you carry on overestimating the cost of making and maintaining an MMO :)

In the games early days, they were also giving out $100,000 prizes for PVP tournaments.

They also make a lot of money from the convenience / appearance items in the cash store.

sldsmkd said:
Bandwidth, Servers, Admins are not Free. What Anet did was heavily optimise the people costs of supporting that so that the cost of running that stuff < less than revenue from shifting boxes.
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I didnt say they were free, I meant that compared to the income that Anet make from the game, the actual server cost is a minimal, tiny fraction of the total cost of maintaining the game.
 
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Ok, heres the total cost to NCsoft for every game they currently maintain, notice how small the bandwidth costs are compared to the total:

ncsoftexpenses.png


sldsmkd said:
lets be generous and say the average revenue is $20 a box (which is very generous)
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Another point to remember is that most GW boxes arent actually that cheap and have never been on budget sales.

A quick Amazon search shows that the main three campaigns still retail for over $20 each:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=guild+wars&x=0&y=0

On release they cost a lot more, and lots of fans also paid extra for collectors editions as well as pre order bonus packs.

Anet also recently sold a lot of GW2 merchandise including an Art Book, Novel, and a Calender. They also released a mercenary hero pack in the cash store not too long ago with the full pack of 8 mercenary slots costing £29.99, which a lot of people bought as they had been requesting this for a very long time on the forums.
 
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sldsmkd said:
What I don't get with them is how they are still in business, they've sold 6.5 million copies of GW or it's expansions and lets be generous and say the average revenue is $20 a box (which is very generous) - so that's what $130 million income.

The GW2 team is 270 strong, and assuming an average of $50k a year (again generous) - thats a burn rate of $13.5 million a year for the last 5 years so $67.5 million on staffing alone.

The margins must be tight and they must need to get GW2 out of the door soon and it has to be a hit.
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They make more than just Guild wars though, Lineage 2 is still a big game in Korea for example.
 
They may also have investment capital, based on the success of the first / hype for the second they could conceivably raise a few million to cover the costs of development.
 
olivier renault said:
They do a good business on micro-transactions. I don't have the revenue figures on that front, but I'd be interested to know.
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I just thought they sold vanity pets/costumes?

I doubt that would generate masses of extra income as the players who buy that guff are in the minority.

They don't sell character advancement skills items (as far as I know) which smaller f2p do to generate cash.

They have had the original and 3 expansion. They are all still around £13 and original prices would have been substantially higher.

I don't really know (or care) about the business models of operating a f2p over a sub based game but I don't know why sub payers get their knickers in a twist over a good game being f2p. I have only partially played the first one (and pretty much every sub based MMO out there as well) but its a damn good game thats still running now so they must be doing something right and its as good as most sub games and still better than some of the newer offerings.
 
I don't understand the hate thrown towards FTP.

Surely it's down to the developers/publishers on whether it's successful. If they are going to make a game FTP, but with micro transactions that absolutely rinse you dry, and are things you need to buy for game/character advancement. If the micro transactions are kept purely to vanity items, it is absolutely fine.

Guild wars is a perfect example of FTP, and it works great.
 
bhavv said:
Ok, heres the total cost to NCsoft for every game they currently maintain, notice how small the bandwidth costs are compared to the total:
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That's *much* less than I expected, but remember NCsoft principally derives revenue from Korea and China which have fairly different Infrastructure costs to the West.

bhavv said:
Another point to remember is that most GW boxes arent actually that cheap and have never been on budget sales.
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I was being exceedingly optimistic about box sale profits, digital expansion packs are almost entirely pure profit for them - but a retail box - the publisher would be lucky to see $10-15 on a $50 box as the distributors and retailers want a (big) cut. I would expect the retailer to take a 40-50% cut. The other stuff is a revenue stream, would imagine a fairly small one tho - and things like artbooks etc are likely to be either loss leaders or break even stuff (really more a part of a marketing budget).

I also gave them a huge benefit of the doubt on wage costs, making an assumption of an average $30-35k salary across the workforce. Given that they are near Seattle, a more realistic figure would be $75-100k (once you factor in stuff like IT, office space, insurance and a reasonable wage).

HHs said:
They make more than just Guild wars though, Lineage 2 is still a big game in Korea for example.
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I think ANet is run as a separate operating company with little direct involvement by Korea. I know for sure NCSoft USA was entirely separate. I would imagine NCSoft funded the studio through the development of the original GW, but pretty much leaves them to get on with stuff.

SteveWD40 said:
They may also have investment capital, based on the success of the first / hype for the second they could conceivably raise a few million to cover the costs of development.
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That's how they started, but they are wholly owned by NCSoft now. I was just pointing out the burn rate of cash must be pretty high on a game that has 270 staff working on it fulltime - and is 2-3 years late. (It was originally slated for 2009). There must be some residual revenue coming in from GW but nothing like what they are chewing through.

Anyway my point was I think they are a good studio and have a good business model, but I think GW2 has cost a lot more to make in terms of time and pure cash burn than they expected and they must be getting to the point where they have to get it out of the door to bring money back into the company, and they need to get big big sales to recoup the costs of development.

I'm personally looking forward to the game and will be buying it.
 
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