Where are we going?

I know that some people will replay with "Another thread" and I know forum is crowded by people who just said the worst or best scenarios about the game's fate. But I want to keep this one different. I want to ignore personal opinions as much as possible and actually analyse some potential outcomes. And for this, I will split the informations into what we know and what could happen.

What happenedAs most of us know, everything started when Anet decided to fire over 100 people. Some were more known that others. We don't have an exact number and we don't know on what projects they were working mostly. I am actually sure that some of them were not even working on GW2 atm, but on other projects. If you look at the most updates from the last year, except the LS episode, most of them were gemstore items. Even the festivals were copy-paste of the old ones.

What Anet did wrongAs we know, over this years tried to invest the money generated by GW2 into other projects. Some say this is bad but, as a gaming company, you cannot focus only on one project. From different sources we know that Arena net is working on 2 more unknown projects. There was a third, but it ended up being abandoned (it was a mobile project if i remember well).

About NCSoftI know many people hate NCSoft for what they did with the other projects. I hated when they closed Wildstar, but it was a dead game, there was no doubt. I personally did not play City of Heroes and I was not so affected by its end. If we look a little at NCSoft main sources of income, we will see GW2 being somehow average. It produces a little over Aion, but is still under Blade&Soul and the old, classy Lineage (Link: https://cdn.gamer-network.net/2018/articles/2018-05-16-10-54/Capture.PNG). And still the catch is somewhere else. Nothing brings as much ca$h into NCSoft as their mobile games. We all know how mobile games work and how kids play with one hand on the phone and another on their papa's credit card.

We have the mobile sales and we have the info about Anet wanting to focus a little on mobile games. This is enough to imagine our first possible outcome. I will try to use cool titles for the outcomes to keep you interested.

Outcome 1: The Walking Gamers (walking...mobile....you got it)Anet starts focusing on mobile games, keep gw2 running with some LS seasons, starting to add less and less content and when the game will stop producing enough, they will just close it.I've seen this before with IGG that kept their games (tales of pirates etc.) running just to produce enough to help them launch on mobile market.

Short and long term problems for GW2Now, to be realistic, the only short-term problem for our game was the fact that WvW update was delayed. As a long term problems, we have to possibilities, based on what we don't know. 1. If the people fired were mostly working on GW2, then we will see less updates/content.

2. If the people fired were working on different projects, it means that those projects will be ,maybe, closed and the devs will move back to GW2. In this case, this is a good thing for GW2. But is less probably for this to happen because they fired people with many years spent on GW franchise.

The truth is, the future is not certain. I started feeling things shaking since they announced 2 LS seasons one after another. This is a sign of "We are still discussing the future of the game so we did not spent time preparing a new expansion".

Outcome 2: The death of GW2In the worst case scenario, they will decide that GW2's time is over. In this case, they will just close it. GW2, as a game, will be consuming resources even to be maintained in a maintenance state. GW1 is different, it has instanced content, things you can do solo, even the devs said that keeping GW1 in maintenance mode is extremlly cheap. With GW2 there will be a different story, when the time comes, they will just close it.

Outcome 3: The New WorldWe know Anet is working on 2 new projects. We know the MMORPG genre is slowly reviving becase many companies, mostly asian, started releasing this kind of games again. We have a WoW Classic coming, we have a brand-new Lord of the Rings MMO in development, we have Crowfall what will be released in 2019, Ashes of Creation(I personally am not so hyped about it), a FF14 still played etc. So, there is a possibility they plan a new GW or a remake, on new engine, of GW2.

Outcome 4 (probably the worst): Lil' McDonald had a cow and he milked her to deathThe scenario where GW2, the symbol of casual gamers, the symbol of buying gems with gold, the symbol of being unique and happy without spending too much turns into a cash-grabber P2W killing game is a horror one. Is it the less probable too because the community itself will not accept this humiliation. But still worth mentioning. We all know what happened to Aion and how it grabs everything.

This is all I had to say. I am looking forward for other possible outcomes, guys.

I'm afraid your 'facts' are inaccurate. Sorry.

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:I'm afraid your 'facts' are inaccurate. Sorry.

Well at least give some of your opinion about this.

I do agree about this possibility tho.

I think there are some thoughts to consider. I do not know the actual facts behind the doors but I'm picking up that ArenaNet's cancelled projects where their own and not Ncsoft projects. That's important because that would mean that ArenaNet was using a lot of their resources on other things than GW2. This would then have caused the delay on the next expansion people thought would come this year.

Building on that it may have been Ncsoft's decision to tell ArenaNet to stop messing about and refocus on what was actually making money. What's interesting in there is that PoF did well and boosted sales for a while also in the gem store. Last quarter that stopped and revenue dropped considerably. This might have ticked Ncsoft off, as they were expecting better results no doubt and ArenaNet's gamble on these other projects didn't pan out.

So Ncsoft may have ordered the layoffs while cancelling those projects as they weren't getting anywhere soon and told ArenaNet to focus on GW2 again. Provided that the 100 layoffs are no more than the resources spent on other projects either GW2 will carry on the same way or it will get a boost in development as they now refocus on GW2. This was strengthened on twitch by one of the ex-devs who said that ArenaNet wasn't focused on GW2 as a studio anymore.

Again, I don't know this factually but it sounds all very plausible when you add it up. ArenaNet took a gamble with these new projects and lost. Ncsoft told them to get back in line. No doubt to please share holders as well. I still think it would be good for ArenaNet to have something else next to GW2 because it won't last forever but perhaps they went about it the wrong way and banked too much on gem store sales being up for a while.

If it's true that Ncsoft pushed for expansions and ArenaNet didn't really want to, well then perhaps we will see a change of direction back to the next expansion sooner rather than later. Either that or expansions are done for but I have to admit that with 300 people still there, it would seem more likely that they do have the (wo)manpower to do that. I just hope that for ArenaNet something else will be coming along aside GW2 because in about 3-5 years the game may not bring in half the revenue it does now. That's kind of how it goes when games get old.

So I think your scenario 2, with a couple of adjustments, is actually the most likely... but mostly with the caveat that this will not last forever and that sooner rather than later they should be working on something new like GW3.

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:I'm afraid your 'facts' are inaccurate. Sorry.

I did not say they are 100% true because Anet is not telling us anything about their other projects.

@Gehenna.3625 said:I think there are some thoughts to consider. I do not know the actual facts behind the doors but I'm picking up that ArenaNet's cancelled projects where their own and not Ncsoft projects. That's important because that would mean that ArenaNet was using a lot of their resources on other things than GW2. This would then have caused the delay on the next expansion people thought would come this year.

Yes, Anet spent GW2 cash on another project of their own (not ncsoft) and they failed, so they closed it.

So Ncsoft may have ordered the layoffs while cancelling those projects as they weren't getting anywhere soon and told ArenaNet to focus on GW2 again. Provided that the 100 layoffs are no more than the resources spent on other projects either GW2 will carry on the same way or it will get a boost in development as they now refocus on GW2. This was strengthened on twitch by one of the ex-devs who said that ArenaNet wasn't focused on GW2 as a studio anymore.

Yes, ncsoft ordered the layoffs but the problem is that some of the people fired were working on GW2. I mean, most of them were not even developers, they were community managers, designers etc. It looks more like a platform-swap to mobile, than just project cancelation and remaking teams, that's my opinion. We cannot know now, we have to wait for the next LS to know exactly.