Curse

BChan · Jun 23, 2005, 04:25 PM // 16:25

Something this tid bit of what's to come in the next week's update made me realize something. Because of the free subscription, and the need for the community to purchase expansions in order to keep afloat, they are truely the only company at the mercy of community's love of the game.

To give you an idea of what I mean, let's take WoW. They are boasting 2mil active subscriptions. @ 15 bucks a month that is 30million revenue to them every month. In addition lets say that only that 2 million bought copies (excluding people like myself that are no longer playing the game) that is roughly 120million in revenue for that purchase. Because of that they can ride on the fact that people are constantly paying in so the need to push updates, and community response is not that high. There are sooo many die hard warcraft fans that on a strict fanboi base alone they can keep going forward and put the power of designating the future of thier product solely on their vision.

Anet as both a new comer and with their business model, has much more to answer to the community. They have to keep a good pulse on the community and really let the community help drive the product. Part of this is probably company policy, but i also feel that way they make their money has helped reinforce this symbiotic relationship.

So what was the point of this thread? Well I think alot of MMO's could value from the example set forward by Anet, its not just the dev's that drive where the product is going, but the customer's that pay for it. There are ideas that devs make that seem good, but if the customer base is going to like it and its not purely for balance then why put it in? Conversely, if the community is screaming for different changes, then why not? If not why not a version that could work? These are things that have disgusted me with other MMO's and something that is making me very happy with Anet's performance thus far.

Sereng Amaranth · Jun 23, 2005, 04:33 PM // 16:33

I also applaud Anet's commitment to browse forums such as this one and really listen to what we have to say. Its similar to an open source project, and those are always great products.