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The Latest NCSoft Financial Report Paints a Sad Picture for GW2 Sales
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
The Latest NCSoft Financial Report Paints a Sad Picture for GW2 Sales
The Q2 2016 NCSoft financials were released a couple weeks ago, covering the period from April to June, and they weren't pretty for Guild Wars 2. In fact, as far as the game goes, they're pretty lousy – if you consider $4.75 million per month lousy.
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"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
People keep going back to WoW. But GW 2 does not have that attraction for its player base.
and don't ever let me get close to how stupid is that especialization they wanted every class do, what especialization is that you can only choose ONE option?
I love all aspects of the PvE side of GW2. I think it is about as perfect as an MMO can get in many aspects. But outside of solo content, the combat in GW2 is poor. It comes down to the binary nature of their design. To ensure there's no tanks everyone can basically get one shot for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. And you WILL be at the wrong place at the wrong time at some point. Since you're basically one shot there's no sense to stack anything but DPS. So in trying to get away from the "limited" nature of the trinity they forced the players into an even more limited meta.
When I saw the direction they were taking with HoT I left. No amount of Gem store shenanigans will get me to go back. Fixing the abysmal group combat will.
But they won't do that. Which is sad. Because I'd be playing it to this day if it weren't so horribly frustrating and unfulfilling.
Not just another pretty color.
I like the game but the developers, ArenaNet are so disconnected from their community that is just frustrating to see, they need to be aware that they lost touch and get back on touch to get GW2 back on a path of growing, not the opposite.
At the end of the day, HoT is just wildly less popular than the game originally was, and their changes to the direction/design have not been well received. Couple that with the massive post HoT content drought, people feeling like Anet has taken too long to fix things they screwed up with HoT, the fact that we know around half the studio is working on the next expansion rather than supporting HoT (whereas during the original game there were roughly 2 years of support exclusively for the live client), and that content, for whatever reason, has come out at a crawl (and that the first installment of LS content, while good, was pretty meager for a quarterly update) and you have an already shrunken playerbase playing less, less engaged, and less motivated to spend money.
HoT has really been kinda a disaster for a game that had one of the strongest launches of a MMO in the past decade and managed to carry a hell of a lot of momentum with it even years afterwards. Anet is on their heels reacting to terrible decisions they've made and they're trying to "right the ship", and they desperately need to.
Your gem store suggestion would be a nice step towards trying to generate some positivity in the community in the short term, but that's all it would do. They need longer term solutions, and the core model behind the gem store is fine. It's worked for years, what's changed isn't the store but peoples perception of the game and Anet.
Anet need to pull themselves out of this hole and they need to do it fast. They need to stabilize the population/revenue and stop pissing off the community now, and then they need to start blasting out fantastic updates and have an incredible expansion. The expansion is where they need to get a huge win, because if they don't they'll be left lingering where they are now - profitable and still successful, but considerably less than they were due to a disastrous expansion.
Specialization being one of them - it's so strong that you weaken yourself if you go with a custom build.
(Not saying it can't be done as I am using a custom on my main too but I do know I am missing out on a lot of damage)
Or when me and my team tried the new changes of the swampland recently.. given that we went in at the max difficulty without any knowledge about the new mechanics....
Green aoe fields popping that are needed to make enemies vulnerable and then A LOT green aoe fields of poison will spawn as well.
All you see then is a green screen - sometimes I wonder if they never never think those things through at all.
Not to mention that you need to know what the boss will do at each stage.
Playing a boss until you know all of his moves and what you have to do then is really not the same as skillful combat.
Anyone remember their manifesto video where they show a giant Leviathan underwater?
I thought they were both not doing well which is why they added F2P, B2P.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
MxM is also a big bet since the public that enjoy MOBAs is far bigger than the MMO crowd, and MXM has unique characteristics compared to other MOBAs.
One can say that an even larger content draught occured in 2015 with higher profits, this period saw a rise in community passion and activity due to anticipation of an expansion. That's how expansions work.
I would look towards Q3 & Q4 2016 for a better sign, assuming Anet can stick to their 3 month living story patches.
The fact that the game is still doing fine after 4 years is amazing.