Monthly fees

how is it that they are not going to charge a monthly fee? Every online game I know of has one...even those that bite. I honestly dont see how its going to be possible. Are they expecting to sell so many that they arent going to need to charge, or are they going to start a monthly fee soon there after?

The no monthly fee has me interested in the game, I hated paying for a game monthly that I only got to play once in awhile. If they are serious about not charging then ill most likely get the game. I just hope that they dont start charging once they see how many people buy the game and realize that they need to maintain the servers.

All online games that I have payed to play have never costed as much as Guild Wars, and with it being the most anticipated MMO this year, I am pretty sure they will do well enough to maintain it, or I hope so. And then there is also expansions too.

what do you mean not cost as much? EQ was 50 retial when it cam out...each expansion was 20 to 30 dollars...then the 12 dollar monthly fee. DAoC, WoW, AO, UO, Matrix, CoH, and SB all the same.....I dont get how GW is not going to charge a monthly fee. If the main game is more then the average price for a computer game then thats crazy to spend that much for a game on realese.

i paid 50 for mine

GW has a more efficiient (less cost) online overhead so they can do it

if their business model did not support it they would not have the huge online publisher that they do

be happy and enjoy it

i know i will

edit

they are not every other online game

they are breaking the old mold

they are GUILDWARS

what i think he means is EQ dosent need to charge any monthly fee's to make there money, samw with WoW, guildwars will be kept up with the money that they get on the intial sales, not a jacked up P2P system like EQ has because theyre greedy. put it this way if 300,000 people buy guildwars at 52.00 (includeing tax) that will mean they made close to 15.6 million dollars, and let me tell you it dosent cost nearly that much to keep a server up or to pay an employee's salary. and then factor in the 30-50 dollars that they will take in with the expansions, and theyre set. it just goes to proove that greedy companies like sony and blizzard are not true game fanatics like the people at Anet and ncsoft, and that they dont care what the player wants, its only abotu the money. JMHO though

GuildWars plans to release expansions frequently to help pay for servers, etc.

Well put static. In addition, these are the guys that made battlenet, which was free. They know what they are doing, and have VERY effective bandwidth management.

Keep in mind that they will probably release expansions more often than other MMORPGS.

Keep in mind that probably more than 300,000 people will buy the game (Europe + Korea + USA).

Keep in mind how many people are attracted by the idea of saving about $150/yr for ONE game. Imagine how many converts this game is going to produce.

Nuff Said.

It is very possible to maintain it. So, It's gonna be $50 for the retail version.
Span this out to a VERY large playerbase... I'm not sure how many people currently have played GW, but I believe there was over 200,000 for the E3E event. And that was quite awhile ago. How many more people do you expect to have tried it in BWE's and liked it from that period of time to the release? I'm thinking a lot. Also, Take into account that GuildWars reaches internationally. Europe, Korea, And North America I believe. So, I'd estimate the player base to be .... I dunno... fairly large. Let's say it was around 700,000 a week or two after it was released. 700,000 x 50 = 35,000,000. That's just a guess. I know that isn't the final amount, Due to fees for a lot of other things, But I'm sure it would last them at least 6 months, In time for the next expansion. I believe they said the cost of expansions would be the same as other First-Tier games, which would be Around $50. Now, It's Been 6 months. The player base has Grown rapidly. Let's say the player base is now 1,500,000. 1,500,000 x 50= $75,000,000. Now that's a lot of money. Now, Let's take into special consideration the costs comparative to other pay-to-play games.. Let's take Asheron's Call 2. It cost $50 to buy the game, With a monthly rate of $12.95, compared to GW's Expansion and Initial Price.
Over 6 months. GW= $50+$50 =$100. AC2= $50+6(13{I'm rounding, Leave me alone!})=$128. Let's span this to 2 years now, Assuming GW comes out with an expansion every 6 months. GW= 4($50)= $200 AC2= $50 + 24($13)= $362

Now that's a money saver. Sure, Less money to Arenanet, But Arenanet has happy players without holes in their pockets. This could possibly increase the playerbase even more.

Assuming that this is a feasible estimate, Don't you think it could happen?

EDIT: Also, I forget to mention that the Expansions are not required to play. You can still PvP without them... Against people who do have them.

Do you seriously think Blizzard needs 10 bucks a month from every poor sap out there? That's more than enough money to produce like 8 games if you add it all up for a year!

Guild Wars costs 50 dollars. The game is great, if you haven't played it. Anyone here would tell you that. Every 6 to 8 months, they will release expansions. These will have about the same amount of content as the original release and will probably cost near the same amount. you DO NOT need to buy these to keep playing. And you won't be left behind if you don't. But you can only play with your friends in the chapters you both have. So if you both have 1, but you decided to get all of them and he skipped number 2, then you couldn't play in number 2, but you could play in 1 together.

guild wars will also net a ton of people like myself, that don't have the time to invest in a game to hit some max lvl 50 or 60 in 8+ months of casual play.

I find it totally refreshing to break away from the 'Woot! I hit lvl n, I'll be uber when I hit n+1' mold

Never head of Blizzard's BattleNet? They've been offering online play for ten years without ever charging a monthly fee. They've made quite a bit of money doing it, too.

To quote Jeff Strain, founder of ArenaNet (the company that made Guild Wars), "For us, this is BattleNet 2.0."

You're making the mistake of comparing the costs of running an MMORPG to the costs of running Guild Wars. Guild Wars is much more like Diablo II Realms in terms of how it works (instanced games with no more than a handful of players, no persistent world, etc.) and shouldn't cost appreciably more to run.

i'm sure ppl at AN has done the math so that they makes enough $$$ as well as continue developing the game.

The real bottom line is that NCSoft would NOT be financing them if they did not think that it would net them a crapload of money.

And Diablo is STILL TO THIS DAY Blizzard's best selling game. And they do not support it anymore.

I love this game and believe it will be around for as long as Diablo and even longer.

I think their exspansions will be far more frequent which almost everyone gets, which will help. Most are a year, these are almost every 6 months I believe?

Man... I remember when I was in the WoW forums and I was quite angry with their customer service and started a thread how Blizzard really didn't need to charge 12 dollars a month if their customer service is so lacking, and content and other issues were lacking. BUT... since the blizzard forums had blizzard (UGLY UGLY HATE EM) fanboys They flamed me.... I didn't even do anything wrong and they flamed me saying I should go burn in hell just because I think Blizzard is being a tad greedy I feel so better reading the posts in this forum that we all agree that Blizzard was a bit greedy ehehe... although they may probably need those monthly fees now that a lot of people stopped playing WoW in my area because I spread the word about Guildwars like wildfire

I donno, it seems like the design of GW calls for less resources. I came from WoW too btw. Lol.

I know exactly what you mean. I was trying to pimp Guild Wars to my friends who play WoW and we got into a bigt argument about whether Blizzad is scamming them or not.

This has been discussed to death.