Guild Wars 2 sold 3.5 million in first year
Guild Wars 2 is celebrating its first anniversary, and has released some stats to mark the occasion. It sold 3.5 million in its first year, and hosted 460,000 players concurrently at its peak.
Guild Wars 2 is coming up on its first anniversary, and ArenaNet is celebrating with some hearty back-slaps regarding its progress so far.
Guild Wars 2 has sold 3.5 million copies so far, which a handy new infographic claims makes it the fastest-selling MMO in history. It reached a peak count of 460,000 concurrent players. The infographic also breaks down stats like the race and profession percentages, and the top crafting disciplines.
One point of pride for president Mike O'Brien is the frequency of updates. The MMO is now updating roughly every two weeks. In the full year (which includes the time before updates were so frequent), it has reached an average of 18.9 days between releases.
"If you ask me what stands out most about our first year, I'll tell you, I think the number one thing we accomplished was reorienting our company to be able to update the game so much," O'Brien wrote. "In the first eight months after launch we shipped eight major releases, and then in the subsequent four months we shipped eight more major releases. We're releasing new content every two weeks. Think about the power of that. We're now updating Guild Wars 2 about five times as often as the typical MMO."
The next update, scheduled for September 3, will bring back the Super Adventure Box gag from April, along with a few other additions.
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replySteve Watts posted a new article, Guild Wars 2 sold 3.5 million in first year.
Guild Wars 2 is celebrating its first anniversary, and has released some stats to mark the occasion. It sold 3.5 million in its first year, and hosted 460,000 players concurrently at its peak.-
And NCSoft shut down a couple hundred thousand people playing City of Heroes at the same time! Happy Anniversary!
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NOC?
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Network Operations Center
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You're mean. Are you Korean? Do you work for NCSoft?
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CoH was profitable and had over a hundred thousand people paying monthly for it. If you want to be a pompous sarcastic jerk, go back to whatever "superior" game you're into. "Mission accomplished."
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Sounds like you're confusing concurrent players with unique users per month. Doubt CoH had that many players, and if it did, too many were freeloaders.
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Nope. "The shutdown" at the same time as "original release of GW2"
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I don't see how that refutes what I said? If CoH had a million people per month paying $15 for example, the game would probably still be running.
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I'm still pretty mad! As long as there are NCSoft games in the news, no one else is gonna forget. :)
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And you wouldn't be if a financially profitable game you enjoyed was shut down for no other reason than freakin' corporate politics?
No, your liberal tears would be all over the floor.-
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and the figure in that slashdot link is for revenue, not profit. does not take operating costs into account. you can confirm this by reading ncsoft's public financial disclosures on their website (seriously, do it -- they have easy-to-read summaries at the beginning). this revenue was a mere 3% of what ncsoft takes in. not really worth keeping a whole studio alive
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Went through some old emails that validate this:
"It’s sad that it got shut down especially when it was in the black as a game. Conjecture is that the studio itself may have been in the red with two secret projects in development? That or NCSoft needed to make an example that they would do the tough management things as they are currently courting a Japanese equity buyer."
Hearsay, but... enough of this.
Best wishes.
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I wound up picking it up back in April after a FTP weekend. It's nice and I like Arenanet. I still don't care for NCSoft, but WildStar does look interesting.
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I hop on usually when I need a break from Internet spaceships
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Considering there is no monthly fee I would assume they don't care as much as long as people will buy the expansion
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I would guess financially the best case would be if people bought the game and expansions and only played each for five minutes. I always though anet was really great and generous with their model and I'm happy it worked out for them, although I burned out on gw2 way faster than 1. Probably because it's so much more like the classic eq / wow formula.
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I know people who quit WoW but come back every time an expansion is released, so this may or may not hold much truth. Sure, someone who plays continually is a lock in to purchase an expansion, that's why GW2 releases content updates every 2 weeks now instead of once a month.
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