Curse

Shakti · Feb 14, 2008, 05:56 PM // 17:56

Quote:

Originally Posted by strcpy

There is ample room for a game nearing three years old that still turns in almost 10 million. In fact, there is ample room for a *new* game that makes that. Especially considering that beats a VERY large portion of games that the industry calls successful - if what you say is true we might as well close all the video game shops out there and only sale WoW since no one out there can compete with them. You can insert *any* game out there, compare it to WoW, and declare it "increasingly difficult for them to compete in a market where the competition has vastly larger streams of income.".

QFT and well said.

Operative 14 · Feb 14, 2008, 07:08 PM // 19:08

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kashrlyyk

Might not be good enough to keep the server running. Does anyone know how much servers costs in a year?

We're talking about profit though, not gross income. So this estimated figure is the profit after paying for server costs.

I know nothing about game management though, so I have no idea what the server costs are. But saying that server costs would even be a noticeable chunk of $2.5 million seems a bit excessive; much less that the server costs would exceed $2.5 million.

Aerian_Skybane · Feb 14, 2008, 07:53 PM // 19:53

Operative has the key words right above... profit.

GW made quite a handy profit for an almost three year old game. Server and game management costs (should) already be covered, so thats pretty damn nice.

The day profit goes negative is typically the day an old game sees its servers closed combined with a negative study result.

GG ANet!

bradktulu · Feb 14, 2008, 10:00 PM // 22:00

I think as has been stated here, those profit margins for an almost 3 year old game is excellent.

It's definitely good news with GW2 on the way(sometime),

No MMO can compete with blizzard and WoW when it comes to profit, it's just stupid to think so in my opinion.

Why, WoW is so popular I really have no idea - because it's not ground breaking or the end all best MMO out there.

Though, I Suppose it's just the legions of loyal fans blizzard have had over the years moving in to WoW, then you have your players who just want the next big thing - then new players that have never heard of blizzard or maybe never played an MMO before wow who love the game.

From what I've seen though, ANET keeps in touch with their players a lot better than blizzard and are extremely generous in providing annual events etc for such a large game that has no monthly fee's.

ANET has really impressed me with their business model and have actually made me believe they actually give a shit about their players beyond how much money we give them.

People have been giving them shit about exploits running rampant lately, but they are a relatively small company compared to most game companies when it comes to employee numbers.

For the size, and being full time on a completely new game/engine for GW2 I think they are still doing an excellent job managing GW - and the fact that they plan to keep the servers open afterward is also a great idea, considering some people may pick up GW2 that haven't played the first set of games - want to pick them up to get in on the overall lore of the game and figure out who all these characters are they are playing with.

All in all, those are excellent figures for a highly underrated game that is almost 3 years old

GG Anet, keep it up.

MikeV · Feb 14, 2008, 10:44 PM // 22:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mordakai

Guild Wars still made $9.9 million in Q4 2007 (GWEN was released in Q3).

But if GW profits continue to decline at the current rate (29%):

Q1 2008 = $7 million
Q2 = $5 million
Q3 = $3.5 million
Q4 = $2.5 million

(let me know if my math is incorrect, I basically just took 29%, subtracted, took 29% of that new number, subtracted, etc.)

It might be a linear decline if there were no such thing as price drops or holiday purchasing spikes. The fact that GW profits are declining is no surprise to anyone at Anet. It's a typical product life cycle which has been kept alive by all of the subsequent relaeases of major and minor chapters. If you think about it, the vast majority of development time/expense came from building the original engine GW is based off of. Everything else after that was just redoing the basic setup. No small task, but much less work intensive as building from the ground up. I'm sure GW has paid for itself a few times over by now and all the profit now can be used towards the development of the next best thing. It's just the way it works and it seems to be working well for them. Good job Anet!