My Thoughts On Arenanet's Quarterly Earnings

To understand Anet's future you HAVE to think like a business man running the company, instead of a business man who would invest into the company. Arenanet had a huge sale during launch, but had a really tough 2 year period.....really tough. Fortunately, they picked up from that mess and got on their feet and respectively as well, they never gave into PW2 even during hard times, that's honorable. Now as a player you may just be seeing good, but not great numbers, but what im seeing is an increase in percentages....steadily....and slowly, but its growing. Now you may say well adrian they made so much as launch and now look at them....no no no you're not thinking wisely. One thing that a good investor will notice isnt the numbers, it isnt the spikes....its the overall steady and continuous growth of a company, and they are accomplishing that. Meaning, that right now they may seem to be making decent, but not great numbers....but what about when they have twice the content they have now? what about when their maps offer 5 times the continuous content they provide now? what happens when players can pick and choose their favorite content within a game.....play it for weeks and week and then pick another group of activities to do with parties that is also continuous and lasts for weeks and months even, and then pick another and so on? its simple, their volume will increase, their playerbase will increase, and that slow but steady growth will increase. When you invest for the long run (not speaking about pennystock), you NEVER invest on a hype, cause it can fail big time....you invest in that steady, strong, and slow growth.

Edit: what im saying its better to trust a safe and steady company for a longterm profit, than a spike that can drop hard, unless you're doing pennystock.

EDIT: Here is someone who explained it so much better than me that I need to post it here for you all to see

@Zedek.8932 said:

» show previous quotesExcelsior.When I've been promoted to department manager at my company and had access to the data, I was shocked that my department loses revenue over 1 year straight. I was surprised and asked my (experienced) boss and he said I should stay cool, the market goes up and down. And he was right: My company pulled off a nice campaign and introduced a few products (emphasis on few) and sudenly, +1.5% revenue compared to last year. We refurbished one department, it has gotten an new look and only very minor changes: A whopping +12.4% in sales. The same products. People are just more attracted.

So "being on a steady decline", especially when coming from a top level, does not mean the game dies soon or is doing bad. A quarter is a too small timeframe, and I think this is what the OP means. We also calculate in fiscal years. Or make it very simple: Go check the stock market. You will see bumps here and there, I am German, so I care abou the DAX since I have stocks there, you can also take DOW JONES.

Do the following: Check the Dow Jones, you will see it grew and suddenly dropped off hard today. That happens. People are getting insane now if they had the same mindset as you. But if you just turn on the "all time graph", you will see it is growing since all time. Smaller bumps happens, and they might even take years (Lehman Brothers, financial crisis, etc). Of course aNet won't have an "all time growth", but going insane for one or two years of "decline" is just over-reacting and misleads to false assumptions. The department we had refurbished was on decline, too. Surrounding companies took our market share away, but with just one good investment we got it back. PoF was a high quality expansion to give GW2 mounts, something many people had as requirement to even look at a game. And they did it well. Just wait, it might take e.g. FF14 to do a mistake and people quit and go back to good ol' GW2. I often read in their forums about things GW2, ESO and WoW do better and that they let run their subscription for FF14 out to play one of those games. Consumer bases shift back and forth.

» show previous quotesThe target audience of GW2 are PvE players. So only a small fraction cares about WvW and sPvP. If this is supposed to be an argument, it's invalid. If it's some random opinion put there to dig deeper into "aNet sucks, GW2 will die" hole, then you're a bit off.

I know many of you guys have good experiences and often diplomas and college education in that matter, but many also just talk random stuff they have no clue about and call the game dying and whatnot. And, as far as I understood the OP right, he is right: It takes time to realize the shift in customers. LoL for example has a bad pre-season right now, and many, many people hate it. Still I don't know about the actual numbers of games played. But I consider to quit LoL after 8 years (!). But it has hasn't happen yet. So my skin I bought for Poppy (10€) will still show up in their next fiscal report while I might actually have already quitted. Look into the numbers in 2 years and you will see people like, that quitted, might cause their numbers to drop. Same for increase of revenue: If people are happy with PoF, they might be attracted and might spend more - in the future.

Excelsior

So... are you saying that Arenanet doesn't need to do anything better as the time goes on?I will blame my Engrish on not fully understanding this completely.

That is kind of getting lost in there as it's one square box.

@Ayumi Spender.1082 said:So... are you saying that Arenanet doesn't need to do anything better as the time goes on?I will blame my Engrish on not fully understanding this completely.

That is kind of getting lost in there as it's one square box.

that has nothing to do with what im saying. LOL im speaking on company earnings, not game quality, they will always improve as they have been continuously improving throughout the years. that is not related to my topic. They will always do better. what im saying is that in terms of earnings, they had a huge drop because of a really hard time they had within the company; probably conflicting creative thoughts and no blueprint on how to do it, BUT they havent told us obviously, so we dont know. thats just random speculation, but what im saying is that they had a really really hard time, and it affected their numbers greatly. they are recovering from that even today, even now where multiple maps are filled (both HOT and POF maps) with squads and activities, their numbers are still recovering. Company damages in earnings usually last for a long time, even if the company is doing great in delivering in the present time.

@Ayumi Spender.1082 said:So... are you saying that Arenanet doesn't need to do anything better as the time goes on?I will blame my Engrish on not fully understanding this completely.

That is kind of getting lost in there as it's one square box.

Basically arenanet isnt relying hard on things like advertisement, but instead, they are relying on their potential for growth. their method is to draw in as much varying continuous content as possible to draw all types of players. not just the hard cores PVPers, not just the hard core Raiders, PVErs, and so on....they want the whole damn pie, which is HARD, but in the longterm, can draw in potential BIG numbers, of established players who can pick and choose between game types, with each type providing VAST content. This is why they have several employees with several teams, thats their end goal, and THEN they might switch over to heavy advertisement (other than just during Xpacs), once they established their goal.

@Adry.7512 said:

@Ayumi Spender.1082 said:So... are you saying that Arenanet doesn't need to do anything better as the time goes on?I will blame my Engrish on not fully understanding this completely.

That is kind of getting lost in there as it's one square box.

Yeah, but what I mean is you pretty much said minus that huge dive that they've slowly been going back up meaning they're somewhat doing something right?Like I said, not main complete English speaking person creature here and just trying to fully grasp the whole situation.

Also not sure on what the huge drop was as I don't think I knew of the game during that time to get it.

@Adry.7512 said:Basically arenanet isnt relying hard on things like advertisement, but instead, they are relying on their potential for growth. their method is to draw in as much varying continuous content as possible to draw all types of players. not just the hard cores PVPers, not just the hard core Raiders, PVErs, and so on....they want the whole kitten pie, which is HARD, but in the longterm, can draw in potential BIG numbers, of established players who can pick and choose between game types, with each type providing VAST content. This is why they have several employees with several teams, thats their end goal, and THEN they might switch over to heavy advertisement (other than just during Xpacs), once they established their goal.

That's part of the issue it seems though. Usually a company would try to cater to one set up and maybe throw a bone to those that might be feeling like trying certain other things like let's say their main goal was WvW...They would then maybe throw a bone to PvE and "smaller WvW"/PvP players a small mode to see how well that do and if not, they go back to WvW.Trying to please everyone does help a bit, but can cause issues as then now the PvP people complain, the PvE will complain, the WvW will complain because "That other mode blah blah blah while my mode blah blah blah"

At the moment, i log into GW2 and i get a feeling i havent gotten in a long time....im genuinely enjoying myself....but yet the game hasnt turned into something else....then why? its because of the variety, the capabilities that the game offers, and how i can pick and choose without thinking that i might miss out on this grind wheel if i invest on the other, its becoming vast, and varied. well i can keep going as to why this game has huge potential, but im sure you get it by now.

@Ayumi Spender.1082 said:

@Adry.7512 said:

@Ayumi Spender.1082 said:So... are you saying that Arenanet doesn't need to do anything better as the time goes on?I will blame my Engrish on not fully understanding this completely.

That is kind of getting lost in there as it's one square box.

@Adry.7512 said:Basically arenanet isnt relying hard on things like advertisement, but instead, they are relying on their potential for growth. their method is to draw in as much varying continuous content as possible to draw all types of players. not just the hard cores PVPers, not just the hard core Raiders, PVErs, and so on....they want the whole kitten pie, which is HARD, but in the longterm, can draw in potential BIG numbers, of established players who can pick and choose between game types, with each type providing VAST content. This is why they have several employees with several teams, thats their end goal, and THEN they might switch over to heavy advertisement (other than just during Xpacs), once they established their goal.

Thats actually NOT the problem. Yea a game can do GREAT by focusing on one type, like take LOL for instance.....whats the problem there? competition, staleness, copy/pastes that can even do the job better, its big risks with big rewards, its a gamble. what Arenanet is doing is they are basically saying, yea we will take the lower earnings, invest in our staff and teams, instead of our pockets, but 10 years from now we wont have any rivals. because they arent going for big risk and big rewards, they are going for longterm potential and steady growth. 10 years from now it will be damn near impossible for other games to copy GW2 as it will have so much VARYING content.

Well the game will steadily grow and the stream of content along with it (prob). So long as they do the right moves so far pof has gone wellish imo. certainly way better than hot.

are gem sales reflected in your numbers...I know for a fact people own this game, but don't play it as often

This is recent?

There has not been growth for the last 2 years since HoT, the game basically plateaued and is now in slow decline, fiscally.

I'm not sure why you would expect growth. GW2 is a mature product at this point, and has, for the most part, reached the players it is going to reach. They aren't going to put out a content update and suddenly attract a bunch of new players.

A.Net's growth prospects aren't from GW2, but from whatever their next big title will be.

I have to admit it's a bit late for me and I skimmed. But I think I agree, anet it a great company and as I've played other games I truly realized how honorable and reliable they are

@STIHL.2489 said:This is recent?

There has not been growth for the last 2 years since HoT, the game basically plateaued and is now in slow decline, fiscally.

Give it a year.

@Ensign.2189 said:I'm not sure why you would expect growth. GW2 is a mature product at this point, and has, for the most part, reached the players it is going to reach. They aren't going to put out a content update and suddenly attract a bunch of new players.

A.Net's growth prospects aren't from GW2, but from whatever their next big title will be.

Could be but look at blizzard. A bunch of good titles but wow is still huge. I’m not saying they will all of a sudden spike up, I’m saying the game will grow.

@Fenom.9457 said:I have to admit it's a bit late for me and I skimmed. But I think I agree, anet it a great company and as I've played other games I truly realized how honorable and reliable they are

Exactly. The previous person said they are focused on a different type of game and that’s great, imo it will attract a later fan base and more popularity to gw2, but he meant that gw2 is basically done. That is definitely not the case as gw2 will continue to grow and add more interesting features or expand on previous ones.

@Adry.7512 said:

@STIHL.2489 said:This is recent?

There has not been growth for the last 2 years since HoT, the game basically plateaued and is now in slow decline, fiscally.

Oh, so you made up future statistics in your head and preach about how well those look? Now that is a level of denial I don't see every day.

Revenue is in a steady decline, so is Anet's content delivery pace.

And P2W is debatable. GW2 was advertised as a game where everyone is on even footing in PvP, but each expansion's elite specs are made purposefully stronger and kept that way for months to pressure everyone into buying them ASAP. This was especially true for season 8, where they dropped the xpac in the middle of the season, so if you didn't buy the expansion in a month following its release, then youhad to say goodbye to what you worked for in the first half of the season.

Anet stops being admirable the moment you step out of your PvE comfort zone.

@"Ensign.2189" said:I'm not sure why you would expect growth. GW2 is a mature product at this point, and has, for the most part, reached the players it is going to reach. They aren't going to put out a content update and suddenly attract a bunch of new players.

A.Net's growth prospects aren't from GW2, but from whatever their next big title will be.

I disagree. It seems GW2 keeps attracking new players and also have a lot of people continuous buying expansions and gems. Arenanet has always been about GuildWars and the reason they went from one to two is cause off the creative direction they wanted to take. https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_Utopia

@"witcher.3197" said:Revenue is in a steady decline, so is Anet's content delivery pace.

Excelsior.When I've been promoted to department manager at my company and had access to the data, I was shocked that my department loses revenue over 1 year straight. I was surprised and asked my (experienced) boss and he said I should stay cool, the market goes up and down. And he was right: My company pulled off a nice campaign and introduced a few products (emphasis on few) and sudenly, +1.5% revenue compared to last year. We refurbished one department, it has gotten an new look and only very minor changes: A whopping +12.4% in sales. The same products. People are just more attracted.

So "being on a steady decline", especially when coming from a top level, does not mean the game dies soon or is doing bad. A quarter is a too small timeframe, and I think this is what the OP means. We also calculate in fiscal years. Or make it very simple: Go check the stock market. You will see bumps here and there, I am German, so I care abou the DAX since I have stocks there, you can also take DOW JONES.

Do the following: Check the Dow Jones, you will see it grew and suddenly dropped off hard today. That happens. People are getting insane now if they had the same mindset as you. But if you just turn on the "all time graph", you will see it is growing since all time. Smaller bumps happens, and they might even take years (Lehman Brothers, financial crisis, etc). Of course aNet won't have an "all time growth", but going insane for one or two years of "decline" is just over-reacting and misleads to false assumptions. The department we had refurbished was on decline, too. Surrounding companies took our market share away, but with just one good investment we got it back. PoF was a high quality expansion to give GW2 mounts, something many people had as requirement to even look at a game. And they did it well. Just wait, it might take e.g. FF14 to do a mistake and people quit and go back to good ol' GW2. I often read in their forums about things GW2, ESO and WoW do better and that they let run their subscription for FF14 out to play one of those games. Consumer bases shift back and forth.

@"witcher.3197" said:Anet stops being admirable the moment you step out of your PvE comfort zone.

The target audience of GW2 are PvE players. So only a small fraction cares about WvW and sPvP. If this is supposed to be an argument, it's invalid. If it's some random opinion put there to dig deeper into "aNet sucks, GW2 will die" hole, then you're a bit off.

I know many of you guys have good experiences and often diplomas and college education in that matter, but many also just talk random stuff they have no clue about and call the game dying and whatnot. And, as far as I understood the OP right, he is right: It takes time to realize the shift in customers. LoL for example has a bad pre-season right now, and many, many people hate it. Still I don't know about the actual numbers of games played. But I consider to quit LoL after 8 years (!). But it has hasn't happen yet. So my skin I bought for Poppy (10€) will still show up in their next fiscal report while I might actually have already quitted. Look into the numbers in 2 years and you will see people like, that quitted, might cause their numbers to drop. Same for increase of revenue: If people are happy with PoF, they might be attracted and might spend more - in the future.

Excelsior.

@witcher.3197 said:

@Adry.7512 said:

@"STIHL.2489" said:This is recent?

There has not been growth for the last 2 years since HoT, the game basically plateaued and is now in slow decline, fiscally.

Go try any of the other products available on the market MMO wise. Give them a good try. Then decide if you want to come back or not. My bet is, you'll be back faster with GW2 than you can say:"Will do."

I love the expansion example which people love bringing up constantly. You do realize in literally every single other MMO on the market, not owning an expansion removes you entirely from the endgame and often you won't even have access to most if not all new endgame content (including pvp). GW2 does not do that, yet people still find ways to complain.

There is a reason why GW2 is considered among the top 5 MMOs unanimously among multiple gaming sites and youtube content providers especially with its development in 2017.

@witcher.3197 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@witcher.3197 said:

@Adry.7512 said:

@"STIHL.2489" said:This is recent?

There has not been growth for the last 2 years since HoT, the game basically plateaued and is now in slow decline, fiscally.

The worst powercreep you have ever witnessed is when you increase the level cap from 100 to 110. The difference between pre PoF and post PoF builds is around 10-20% in overall performance (and that's not even accross the board for only new elite specs) based on pve benchmarks (which is the easiest quick peak number to look at to compare performance).

Want me to do the math for you in WoW? Here's a hint: it'll be beyond 200-300% or more.

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@witcher.3197 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@witcher.3197 said:

@Adry.7512 said:

@"STIHL.2489" said:This is recent?

There has not been growth for the last 2 years since HoT, the game basically plateaued and is now in slow decline, fiscally.

I wouldn't call that powercreep, because in PvP the time to kill was the same 2-3 expansions ago as it is now. You hit someone for 10% of their HP at 90 and you hit for 10% of their Hp at 110.

Not in GW2, where power levels are going up but health and armor doesn't increase with it. Before HoT 2k condition damage per sec was considered to be a condition spike, now you can stack it to 6k/sec in no time. 2-3 years ago 6k was an insane critical hit, now we have Holosmiths hit for a similar amount with nearly everything while dodging for 4k AoE. At release the best support guardian build had like 3 skills that actually healed someone else, and for 1-2k at best, with 2 ways to apply aegis. Now guards can spam 2k AoE heals like a machine gun and the same with Aegis.

Or boon corruption used to only exist on 2 skills in the entire game, and both were utilities. Now we have them on autoattacks.

@witcher.3197 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@witcher.3197 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@witcher.3197 said:

@Adry.7512 said:

@"STIHL.2489" said:This is recent?

There has not been growth for the last 2 years since HoT, the game basically plateaued and is now in slow decline, fiscally.

Unless you are fighting a level 100 as a level 110. Wasn't your complaint that expansions are required or pay to win?

That's not even getting into any gear depreciation details.

Also I doubt you've reached endgame in WoW or played any prolonged amount of time. Time to kill reaches absurd fast levels in that game towards the end of an expansions live cycle too.

@witcher.3197 said:

Not in GW2, where power levels are going up but health and armor doesn't increase with it. Before HoT 2k condition damage per sec was considered to be a condition spike, now you can stack it to 6k/sec in no time. 2-3 years ago 6k was an insane critical hit, now we have Holosmiths hit for a similar amount with nearly everything while dodging for 4k AoE. At release the best support guardian build had like 3 skills that actually healed someone else, and for 1-2k at best, with 2 ways to apply aegis. Now guards can spam 2k AoE heals like a machine gun and the same with Aegis.

Or boon corruption used to only exist on 2 skills in the entire game, and both were utilities. Now we have them on autoattacks.

Those are balance issues in progress. Yes, balance is off and takes quite a while longer to get perfected. This is directly related to not being able to reset skills and gear every expansion. Balancing 27 classes (if we count elite specializations as almost a full class) is very difficult. That's not necessarily powercreep. Especially in spvp where stats have not changed and gear is non existent.

There is an upside and downside to not having gear progression. You can't complain about it on the one hand but want it on the other. Enjoy your time in WoW. You'll get to redo everything in 6 months once the next expansion hits (which can be fun, I love me some 2-3 weeks of WoW once new expansions hit but grow very tired of it fast).

To predict how much arenanet got is going to be very off no matter what. Before pof arenanet gave a number release of how many accounts active However we do not know how many that have been bought. So to give an exact number of anything will be a theory rather than fact. Also we do not know how much arenanet averages per day on gems. And items on the gem store. Which is very key.

As much as we would like to give an opinion how arenanet is doing we truly have no grasp since we have no number or statistics of how many pof of hot expansions be bought since pof launch. We don’t know how many gems been bought since release.

All we know so far is arenanet did give an expansion improvement which is good. Most old players came back. How may? Who knows but it’s still good. I truly believe pof was a success. And think that arenanet did a good job since release. But to determine how they are. We don’t know. We don’t know the number where it says they are doin bad. All we know is l, the only way for them to do bad is when they stop making gw2. And so far they are still adding more things. So I’m assuming they are still profiting

@"witcher.3197" said:

Sure, in most games the latest expansion is almost mandatory to enjoy the game. Difference is, GW2 doesn't increase the level cap yet increases the power of new specs to a point where it feels like you're fighting lvl 90s, and that's a terrible thing which leads to the worst case of powercreep I have ever witnessed. Players should buy the new expansion if they want new ways to play, not because otherwise PvP is unplayable.

This is a good point, and something I had not thought of, they are ramping up the power, but giving the illusion that you don't need to go after it, because they have not added any new official power levels. Other games have used the idea of Alt-levels, to add power or give power boosts for new "harder" content, without the stigma of adding direct levels. Anet is doing exactly that but putting them in disguise behind Elite Specs, Mastery Lines, which makes sense, you can't add power to the game and keep everything the same, at best you can give an illusion of things being immutable, but it's just that.. an illusion.

As such, even PvE gets affected, hence some of the complaints about the new Stories being much harder then the older Story content, because while it may all say the same tier, the new content is designed with the new stats and abilities in mind. So harder PvE content would not make any sense if the game has capped. but it hasn't, so the content gets harder because the power creep is there, but it hidden in a way to allow people to think they can get away without it, which is not the intention.

Shrewd and Deceptive.

Well that gave me something to think about.

@witcher.3197 said:

@Adry.7512 said:

@STIHL.2489 said:This is recent?

There has not been growth for the last 2 years since HoT, the game basically plateaued and is now in slow decline, fiscally.

There are no future statistics it’s my prediction of the future of the game. It will pick up, it’s an obvious outcome when considering the facts in the long term.