ANet numbers regarding GW2. Discussion.

[UnbentMars.9126]

@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:

@UnbentMars.9126 said:

@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:

@UnbentMars.9126 said:

@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:

@UnbentMars.9126 said:

@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:

@UnbentMars.9126 said:

@Sir Vincent III.1286 said:

@Cristalyan.5728 said:From the official ANet site I have the following numbers:

1. GW2 (as a whole game) has 11 000 000 (11 millions) players.
2. During the life of GW2 the players created over 53 056 000 (53,05 millions) characters.
3. The 11 millions characters formed 952 000 guilds (almost 1 million).
4. The +53 millions characters completed 430 773 344 hearts (430,77 milions)
5. This is not from ANet site - a friend saw this: The griffon number in game is now over 50 000.

What can I understand from this (almost commercial) announcement:

• 11 millions players ... I saw here on this forum a lot of ppl claiming they have more than one account - payed account. I saw the signature of one colleagues stating he has 30 accounts. That means is more accurate to say that the number of
  accounts
  is 11 millions. Players are less.

• 53 millions characters for 11 millions accounts means an average of almost 5 characters per account. Normal you can say. But, I saw here, on this forum, many, many players stating they have tens of characters (some having the maximum number of characters). Even I, a non character addicted, have 13 characters. That means
  a lot
  of accounts have
  less
  than 5 characters per account. By buying the game you can create 5 characters - this is free after buying the game. And still there are lot of accounts with less than 5. I can conclude from this that the degree of retaining new players is
  low
  if you don't play enough to need 5 characters (even for storage space if not for effectively playing)

• 430 773 344 hearts completed. This is IMPRESSIVE at the first look. But, only in core Tyria we have around 330 hearts. That means the core Tyria was completed by +1,3 millions characters. HM? 1,3 from 53 ? That means ~2,5% from all the characters completed the core Tyria. I also saw here, on the Forum a lot of persons claiming that they completed the map several times (some of them
  tens
  of times). I completed the map (all the maps, not only Tyria) 3 times. My conclusion: less than 1 million players completed a map discovery in Tyria. Comparing this with the total number of accounts .... that means ~9% of the players completed Tyria.

• Almost 1 million guilds. We have 11 millions accounts, but less than 11 millions players playing the game during its lifetime. That means an average of 10 players per guild. HM. With HoT the tendency was to annihilate the small guilds in favor of the larger (meta) guilds. I think it is an interesting detail if ANet will give us the number of guilds founded
  after
  the HoT release.

• Finally: +50 000 griffons. We know (from the more or less accurate data from GW2 efficiency) that HoT lost a lot of players in its 2 year existence. How many - hard to say. But the playerbase was smaller at the end of HoT that at the beginning. And from this smaller playerbase a part bought PoF. From the players with PoF, over 50 000 have the griffon.

Disclaimer

: This is my estimation, based on my own observations. It may be inaccurate or entirely wrong. I will post it because it completes what I write:So, I consider that around 40-50% from the PoF players already have the griffon. Why 40-50%? Because in my opinion the percentage of "veteran" players who bought PoF is greater than the percentage of new starters who bought PoF. That means the majority of the PoF owners had the skills and the money to acquire the griffon. Only the time is a problem for some of them.So, this is the reason I considered this percentage. From this, my conclusion is that 100-120 000 players have PoF.

Conclusion: Starting from 11 millions accounts having the vanilla and ending with 0,1 millions owning PoF, it seems that GW2 is doing a very poor job to keep the veterans playing. I don't know if this is related only with the game - for me GW2 seems to be a very good MMO. Maybe the management of this game is a little bit ... wrong?

Please add other numbers if you find. Please correct me if you consider I'm wrong. And please post your own feelings about the numbers ANet listed on the site and based on this, about the future of the game.

Thanks for the patience to read all of this.

40%-50% sounds about right and it roughly matches this report.

http://sirvincentiii.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/GW2_4Q16_Report.png

It would be very helpful if there was any context for that image, as it stands there's not even a label on the Y axis...

http://www.ncsoft.net/global/ir/quarterly.aspx

Thanks for the source, but earnings is not a descriptive metric of players especially given that PoF cost half of what HoT did and the addition of F2P means that many active players have never spent a dime on GW2.

For all that shows, we could have had a 500% increase in active players mostly in the F2P version of the game. Additionally, that report doesn't even show any profits from PoF since the pre-order wasn't even released until after the Q2 report.

My reply is specifically about this;

"Why 40-50%? Because in my opinion the percentage of "veteran" players who bought PoF is greater than the percentage of new starters who bought PoF. "

...which roughly matches the earnings. Meaning only 40%-50% of veterans are left making purchases.

EDIT: Also, the image I posted is from 4Q16 just to show how much it dipped since HoT.

EDIT 2: However, I think they'll see a bounce back with PoF.

Again, if your statement is regarding OP's statement about #'s of people who bought PoF, the graph you provided shows absolutely nothing from PoF, so making a statement about PoF from that is nothing more than pure speculation.

Even if I were to concede that 40-50% of veterans are making purchases (which still makes a huge number of baseless assumptions given how many long-time veterans have never made a gemstore purchase with gems they bought with real money as opposed to gold), that still is not a good metric for measuring how many people are playing given that that's '40-50% of veterans playing during the

final

days of HoT rather than people who returned from hiatus for PoF or new-new players. That said, that 40-50% guess is still just that. A wild guess.

Yes, it's a guess, but an educated one. A guess that matches the earnings report. You can then come to whatever conclusion you want with it.

It's not an educated guess if the 'data' you are pulling is almost entirely unrelated or unrealistic as I have explained above. Using that data and your definition, I could come to the 'educated guess' that 11 million individual people play guild wars every single day and have spent an average of 1.5 Chinese Won per quarter. Just because you

can

make a guess doesn't mean its based in any sort of realism.

guessverb

1. estimate or suppose (something) without sufficient information to be sure of being correct.

It's not the 'guess' portion I was referring to, it's the modifier you put in front of it:

ed·u·cat·ed guessnouna guess based on knowledge and experience and therefore likely to be correct.

[CptAurellian.9537]

The assumption that 40-50% of all PoF players already have the griffon is funny. I'm confident that the real number is much lower, because the griffon is gated by a substantial amount of money and various time-related aspects.

[Danikat.8537]

@tairneanach.8427 said:

@Cristalyan.5728 said:

• 11 millions players ... I saw here on this forum a lot of ppl claiming they have more than one account - payed account. I saw the signature of one colleagues stating he has 30 accounts. That means is more accurate to say that the number of
  accounts
  is 11 millions. Players are less.

Likely, but so what?

Edit: Actually, since the site specifically says 11 million

players

I should think that that's actually the amount of players rather than accounts. Look at similar releases by, say, Blizzard, who are careful to always talk about active accounts, not players. It's quite important in the corporate world to be precise about what numbers you throw around lest your shareholders take offense.

You're right, but you have to consider why it's important and what they're being precise about in a corporate context.

Blizzard reports the number of active accounts because they make a significant chunk of their income (possibly even the majority) from subscriptions - so the number of active, subscribing players is a way of measuring their income. Whereas Anet makes their money from box sales and the gem store.

The second important point is that Blizzard is a publicly traded company - it's possible to buy shares in the company. Which means they need to report their income in a publicly available format so potential shareholders can find it and decide if they want to buy. Anet on the other hand is a privately owned company which means they don't need to make any info on their finances public.

I'm absolutely certain that Anet monitor and report a lot more precise financial information - like the number of box sales and how much were PoF, HoT or the base game, and the number of gems bought and what was bought with those gems (although that last bit may not be reported outside the gem store team since it's probably not important to anyone else). But they have no need to make any of that info public, so they don't.

Instead they report simpler numbers that make for great headlines for current players and journalists and may encourage potential players that the game is still going strong and worth picking up.

@CptAurellian.9537 said:The assumption that 40-50% of all PoF players already have the griffon is funny. I'm confident that the real number is much lower, because the griffon is gated by a substantial amount of money and various time-related aspects.

I agree. I suspect it's another case of people on a game's forum assuming they are representative of the entire playerbase and forgetting that people who spend time on the forum are more likely to be dedicated, long-term/otherwise heavily invested players. Not necessarily 'hardcore' players because that usually implies a level of skill and dedication to playing difficult content, but people who feel invested in the game enough to not only play regularly but to spend additional time discussing it. And that's going to include a high proportion of people who complete the expansion faster than average and have/can get the gold to buy the griffon immediately.

I really hope Anet continues to update us on the number of griffons, at least for a while. A percentage of players/PoF owners/'active' players who own it would be ideal but highly unlikely to happen.

[SkyShroud.2865]

This is obviously just for marketing. They won't ever tell you how many are active and inactive which is the most important. Even when games coy tell you have so and so amount of active players, they won't tell you base on how many months and periods. Marketing is about putting out half truth, only the attractive looking parts. They can't made up lies because is against the law, for example, false advertisement.

There is no point in those data.

[Ashen.2907]

I polled my imaginary friends, who used imaginary tarot cards to determine that there are currently 6 million active paid accounts.

Fact. Imaginary tarot cards do not lie.

[TheRandomGuy.7246]

In the end player retention is all that matters. And it looks like PoF was not made with it in mind.

[Michael.9403]

Once it went free to play, number of "subscriptons" becomes meaningless. Disney has free to play games that are marketing for their movies, and some have 250 million "subscribers". The telling metrics would be number of games SOLD, number of expansions sold, and total number of gems sold. One could evaluate that.
As someone above mentioned, the quarterly financials will come out soon, which convolve a quarter's worth of the metrics I mentioned above.

While I expect a bump up in revenue, overall year to year there are plenty of signs they are on the decline manpower wise, and labor costs almost always are tuned to follow revenue.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Manpower-wise? If you mean the amount of Devs (employees), that has steadily risen year to year. There are now (at latest declaration, a few months ago) at 400+ Devs (employees). They started, at launch, with ~250.

[Drew.1865]

TLDR. Could care less how many players are playing any mmo. I'm not a stockholder. Never believed any of WOWs sub numbers and don't believe any regarding any other mmo. If a game is fun I play it. If it's no longer fun I quit.

[battledrone.8315]

@SkyShroud.2865 said:This is obviously just for marketing. They won't ever tell you how many are active and inactive which is the most important. Even when games coy tell you have so and so amount of active players, they won't tell you base on how many months and periods. Marketing is about putting out half truth, only the attractive looking parts. They can't made up lies because is against the law, for example, false advertisement.

There is no point in those data.

yes there isit shows, that the core game can still attract playersover 2 mio per year, those are very good numbers in this businessbut they wasted too many resources on story and other special "features"

[battledrone.8315]

@TheRandomGuy.7246 said:In the end player retention is all that matters. And it looks like PoF was not made with it in mind.

yep they tried to make everyone happy on the same maps, and it failedwith some heavy nerfing they could be great for casual play

[Dreamy Lu.3865]

I believe another point of view has not been considered: The way many veteran players are playing. I am one and I have a lot of game friends who all are, dispatched in many different guilds. About 90% of us have something in common: A totally different way to play now, compared to how we were playing originally, the main point being that we take our time at new adds.We do not feel the need to have everything done within minimum possible time. It is the opposite, we want to keep things to do as long as possible, to get fun and share it with friends, to progress and enjoy together. We mostly keep going with our usual activities and Elona is just one thing more we add to the planning, thus partial time only. I tend to believe that there are quite a lot of players like this and it certainly has an impact on numbers. An example: None of us have finished the storyline and none of us have a Griffon yet. That will be one more good thing we will enjoy at a later step. That's why I don't think that veterans are those making the 50k griffons. I rather believe that players having a griffon yet are those of the generation who want everything done within short time and rush through the new stuff, as in most probably rather the "young" generation of players (I mean nothing negative in that).The base of old players manage differently with new content. At least that's what I witness around me. Of course, I can't tell if we are representative or not. However, one thing I stated already several times with the new adds, is that months later, when we are in a place doing something first time, and we talk in map chat with those doing it at same time than us, we are all veteran players. That's why I believe I am not too much wrong.

[STIHL.2489]

@TheRandomGuy.7246 said:In the end player retention is all that matters. And it looks like PoF was not made with it in mind.

Not really. Especially with games that depend on an Item shop to generate money, those games need to retain Paying Players, not just simple numbers, like a subscription game. Which means, a game like GW2, could in effect lose in all likelihood every F2P player they had, and still show no loss in profit from quarter to quarter, and could even show in increase as the paying players spent more.

Equally so, due to the varying spending habits of games that use an Item shop for money, they could lose as little as 10% of their paying base, and take a 50% loss to their income, especially if they lose the high rollers, aka: Whales.

With that in mind, HoT failed hard at retaining the paying players, as within 6 months after HoT's release, Anet's earnings had dropped to less then half what they were Pre-HoT. And while we don't know what percent of the overall population may have left, we do know that over 50% of their paying player base was not enticed by HoT enough to stay around.

Now, I know that I didn't spend all that much on GW2 before I left due to HoT, a paltry 40- 100 a month, but it seems that players like me, who tried to at least give it a fair go, before accepting that this new direction of the game was simply not enjoyable for us. Which is reassuring to know at least they gave it a fair try.

The real question at this point, is will PoF be enough to entice them back, or will they return, see the game still riddled with the same problems and reasons why they left in the first place.. and just.. pass on to something else.

I'll admit, since playing again, I have not returned to being among the paying players either, and I might not ever, I have not even bough PoF... still gonna wait an see a bit longer on that, Also.. I am gonna be honest, I'm not really invested as I used to be. That is just the nature of a returning jaded player I guess.

So I would wager we also won't PoFs impact in a fiscal manner till around 6 months after it's release.

[Coulter.2315]

@Cristalyan.5728 said:This is my estimation, based on my own observations. It may be inaccurate or entirely wrong. I will post it because it completes what I write:So, I consider that around 40-50% from the PoF players already have the griffon. Why 40-50%? Because in my opinion the percentage of "veteran" players who bought PoF is greater than the percentage of new starters who bought PoF. That means the majority of the PoF owners had the skills and the money to acquire the griffon. Only the time is a problem for some of them.So, this is the reason I considered this percentage. From this, my conclusion is that 100-120 000 players have PoF.

I don't agree with this.

Just look at GW2 efficiency stats and you'll see a lot of players have far too low an account value for them to have 250g free to spend. Remember a lot of account value is added by gemstore items, including PoF bonus stuff. Also GW2efficiency will likely over-estimate any median because only people with an interest in their account will use it - so will be more invested in GW2 than true values for whole population. So I'm not sure the money is there for your estimate.

You also are speaking as if griffons are just instant purchase you can make from a menu on buying PoF. You need to complete the story and follow some clues in game or search how to get it online - to you and me this may seem trivial but you'd be surprised at the number of people who will not fulfill these requirements in the first two weeks. I'm not sure the access to griffons is there for your estimate.

So I cannot believe your estimate, nice to see someone playing with numbers though.

[Healix.5819]

@Haishao.6851 said:They'll bounce up because of PoF and go back down after a few months like it did with HoT https://i.imgur.com/A0nATvj.png

Sales will of course spike due to box sales, but what's important is past that, the normal profits. If PoF is successful, the after-launch profits should be higher than before, showing that they not only brought players in, but also managed to keep them interested. If it's really successful, it should also begin trending upwards. For comparison, HoT took a 25% hit, which ended up outweighing the influx from box sales by PoF's launch.

[maddoctor.2738]

@STIHL.2489 said:With that in mind, HoT failed hard at retaining the paying players, as within 6 months after HoT's release, Anet's earnings had dropped to less then half what they were Pre-HoT. And while we don't know what percent of the overall population may have left, we do know that over 50% of their paying player base was not enticed by HoT enough to stay around.

Remember that before HoT the game wasn't free to play and the Guild Wars 2: Heroic Edition was still a high seller on online websites like Amazon. Anet's earning dropping are not only because HoT failed hard to retain paying players but because the core game failed even harder to convert those free players into paying customers. And that was even confirmed by NCsoft when they said that the conversion rate was surprising low. A lot of their revenue was coming from heroic edition sales, but now that you did not need to pay anything to try the game, it was evident that the free version wasn't good enough to entice players to buy it anymore.

Not to mention how hard the core game failed at retaining paying players, the drop in revenue after HoT is nothing compared to the gigantic drop of revenue the few months after release. Blame HoT all you want about failing to retain players, but the main problem in player retention was, and still is, the core game, and this became even more serious when they went free to play and you no longer have to pay to try it.

[FrizzFreston.5290]

Some players in my guild and myself included dont have the griffon yet. Some decided not worth it others havent had the time to mindlessly grind this one mount.

Anecdotal at best ofcourse. but some things that are happening. The biggest crowd is casual after all.

[Rikkagin.9472]

• I believe Everquest peaked at around 500,000 subs, massive back in 2001-2.
• Horizons: Empire of Istaria gained 50,000 subs at launch but was down to a few thousand within 6 months. It went through management changes, a major revamp, but still slowly bled to death.
• Everquest 2 failed to exceed Everquest, gaining only around 350,000, though no accurate numbers were available. *Blizzard launched WoW a month after EQ2, at the end of 2004. It launched in March 2005 in Europe. It very quickly surpassed Everquest and all other previous MMORPGs, however at it's peaks it's number of paying subs stood at around 4 million. The vast majority of accounts were in Asia where players would pay for login time at internet cafes. Blizzard stated they counted a player as active if the logged once a month. The 11-12 million subs news from Blizzard was obviously just marketing.
• I think Turbine claimed it had sold 1,000,000 boxes, but it's sub number was far, far lower, leading to FTP.

Since Guild Wars 2 went free-to-play trying to count players or accounts is an exercise in futility. Have 11 million individuals made an account, or it is just 11 million accounts?What we can say is:

• Anecdotally, many players claimed they quit GW2 after playing HoT. This may have affected some players buying the expansion.
• Anecdotally, many players claimed they quit GW2, but returned for HoT. Raids may have been a factor, and may have brought in many new players since HoT.
• Shortly after launch of HoT it was stated, either by Anet, or Nsoft, that sales to HoT were disappointing.
• The content drought may have been a factor in players quitting, but Living World 3's six big releases may have reversed that.
• Player retention is important for continued Gem Store sales and the next expansion, if revenue goes down Anet may have to cuts costs, meaning staff redundancies. Content takes longer to make, or release, leading to more players drifting away, leading to less revenue, leading too.....
• Many other games have suffered this and were shut down or placed on life support for a small core of players.
• The quarterly financial update will provide a better picture of the games health and the success of PoF.

Finally, having said all that the numbers Anet posted, it seemed to me, were just for fun.

[maddoctor.2738]

@Rikkagin.9472 said:

• Shortly after launch of HoT it was stated, either by Anet, or Nsoft, that sales to HoT were disappointing.

I don't remember Anet or NCsoft stating that the sales of HoT were ever disappointing. Only thing they mentioned was the conversion of free to play players into paying customers was low. Nothing about sales

[Healix.5819]

@maddoctor.2738 said:I don't remember Anet or NCsoft stating that the sales of HoT were ever disappointing. Only thing they mentioned was the conversion of free to play players into paying customers was low. Nothing about sales

NCSoft basically did, as they said GW2's performance was weaker than expected and blamed the conversion from free players. It's not surprising they'd think that considering 2 million accounts were created, but only 300-500 thousand copies were sold based on the earnings. They had a lot of bad advertising for HoT however, like them focusing on raids at PAX/E3, veterans/pricing and the various content related problems, so it's really not surprising it did poorly. PoF has had no major advertising however, so we'll see how that turns out in November.

From the analysts side, HoT's sales were disappointing, as it was roughly 30% lower than predicted.

[STIHL.2489]

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@STIHL.2489 said:With that in mind, HoT failed hard at retaining the paying players, as within 6 months after HoT's release, Anet's earnings had dropped to less then half what they were Pre-HoT. And while we don't know what percent of the overall population may have left, we do know that over 50% of their paying player base was not enticed by HoT enough to stay around.

Remember that before HoT the game wasn't free to play and the Guild Wars 2: Heroic Edition was still a high seller on online websites like Amazon. Anet's earning dropping are not only because HoT failed hard to retain paying players but because the core game failed even harder to convert those free players into paying customers. And that was even confirmed by NCsoft when they said that the conversion rate was surprising low. A lot of their revenue was coming from heroic edition sales, but now that you did not need to pay anything to try the game, it was evident that the free version wasn't good enough to entice players to buy it anymore.

Not to mention how hard the core game failed at retaining paying players, the drop in revenue after HoT is nothing compared to the gigantic drop of revenue the few months after release. Blame HoT all you want about failing to retain players, but the main problem in player retention was, and still is, the core game, and this became even more serious when they went free to play and you no longer have to pay to try it.

Almost Every Successful mainstream MMO, without fail, has see a huge drop in players and sales within a few months after going live, this can be seen from the dawn of MMO's, dating back as far as EQ, and UO, even WoW was not immune to the post-launch fall off, so that is not only irrelevant to the quality of the game, it is typical and to be expected of any MMO that had decent pre-order sales. Now to be fair, it was much easier back then to track these kinds of things, because all they had to do was track subs as opposed to speculating about the rise and fall of blanket sales numbers.

This however, does not hold as true for expansions, often, with expansions, there will be slight rise in accounts/spending, and then it slowly tapers off. With HoT we see a very abrupt drop off. Now, Q4,15, was all the expansion sales, so we would see a substantial number of people (since the game was B2P) that did not spend money regularly investing into purchasing the expansion. So, that number was very high. It would be wrong to use that as a benchmark of typical sales.

Lets look at Pre-HoT sales, For a little over a year straight sales were hovering in the 20 - 22 range, this was the foundation player base that was routinely spending money in the gem store, with HoT spiking the sales to 37 - 30, for 2 whole quarters. Then the numbers drop to 14 - 15. Now see, This is where the real loss is, that 5 to 7 point drop, was a drop in the already loyal and established players who were regularly spending money in the game store, which is the lifeblood of a game like GW2.

Now you may try to play that off as something to do with Core itself going F2P, but, keep in mind the conversion of F2P into Paying Players, required the purchase of HoT, not some Deluxe Edition of Core. So again, the failure to convert the F2P accounts into paying accounts had nothing to do with how good or bad the Core game itself was, but due to a total lack of incentive on the F2P players side to purchase HoT. Might have something to do with how poorly received it was.

Also, to cement that point, if offering core for free and only selling HoT netted a loss in overall sales, that would mean that Core was still a good seller, and HoT was not.

[maddoctor.2738]

@STIHL.2489 said:Lets look at Pre-HoT sales, For a little over a year straight sales were hovering in the 20 - 22 range, this was the foundation player base that was routinely spending money in the gem store, with HoT spiking the sales to 37 - 30, for 2 whole quarters. Then the numbers drop to 14 - 15. Now see, This is where the real loss is, that 5 to 7 point drop, was a drop in the already loyal and established players who were regularly spending money in the game store, which is the lifeblood of a game like GW2.

And this is where you are wrong, the Guild Wars 2: Heroic Edition was still selling prior to the change to free to play and that revenue disappeared when they gave the game for free.

Now you may try to play that off as something to do with Core itself going F2P, but, keep in mind the conversion of F2P into Paying Players, required the purchase of HoT, not some Deluxe Edition of Core. So again, the failure to convert the F2P accounts into paying accounts had nothing to do with how good or bad the Core game itself was, but due to a total lack of incentive on the F2P players side to purchase HoT. Might have something to do with how poorly received it was.

The conversion of F2P into paying players required them to like the core game enough to get the expansion so the failure to convert the F2P accounts into paying accounts was solely the fault of the Core game to excite players enough to make that conversion. If players didn't like the Core game then it's highly unlikely that they would pay for an expansion. Before F2P in order to see the faults of the game, you had to buy it first, leading to that mass exodus of players once they figured how the core game was.As for the lack of incentive, I'd say it was more a lack of excitement.

If someone loves a game they will buy the expansion for it, if they do not like a game, they won't buy it. So it's simple, the problem is in the Core game, not HoT

[maddoctor.2738]

@Healix.5819 said:NCSoft basically did, as they said GW2's performance was weaker than expected and blamed the conversion from free players. It's not surprising they'd think that considering 2 million accounts were created, but only 300-500 thousand copies were sold based on the earnings. They had a lot of bad advertising for HoT however, like them focusing on raids at PAX/E3, veterans/pricing and the various content related problems, so it's really not surprising it did poorly. PoF has had no major advertising however, so we'll see how that turns out in November.

From the analysts side, HoT's sales were disappointing, as it was roughly 30% lower than predicted.

From your own link:“To talk about the Guild Wars 2 performance, it is weaker than what we have expected." According to Ncsoft the reason lies in the conversion from play for free to the paid expansion. This conversion rate is not as high as expected/hoped by NCsoft. The amount of gem sales and item sales versus active players is ok. “ but it is more the issue of the conversion to the paid expansion pack that we have not seen the level (of sales) we have hoped”

Note how they don't say anything about the conversion of current active core players into expansion owners but rather the conversion of NEW f2p players into expansion players. Core players converted, new players did not.

[IndigoSundown.5419]

@maddoctor.2738 said:

And this is where you are wrong, the Guild Wars 2: Heroic Edition was still selling prior to the change to free to play and that revenue disappeared when they gave the game for free.

Got a citation for that? I find it hard to believe that Heroic Edition sales provided significant revenue.

The conversion of F2P into paying players required them to like the core game enough to get the expansion so the failure to convert the F2P accounts into paying accounts was solely the fault of the Core game to excite players enough to make that conversion. If players didn't like the Core game then it's highly unlikely that they would pay for an expansion. Before F2P in order to see the faults of the game, you had to buy it first, leading to that mass exodus of players once they figured how the core game was.As for the lack of incentive, I'd say it was more a lack of excitement.

If someone loves a game they will buy the expansion for it, if they do not like a game, they won't buy it. So it's simple, the problem is in the Core game, not HoT.

And yet, there was a Fortune article about GW2 ESports a couple of months before HoT dropped citing 1.5 million monthly active (paid) accounts, which roughly doubled to 3 million once Play for Free hit. HoT sales were at best (at that time) a third of those paid accounts.

@maddoctor.2738 said:

From your own link:“To talk about the Guild Wars 2 performance, it is weaker than what we have expected." According to Ncsoft the reason lies in the conversion from play for free to the paid expansion. This conversion rate is not as high as expected/hoped by NCsoft. The amount of gem sales and item sales versus active players is ok. “ but it is more the issue of the conversion to the paid expansion pack that we have not seen the level (of sales) we have hoped”

Note how they don't say anything about the conversion of current active core players into expansion owners but rather the conversion of NEW f2p players into expansion players. Core players converted, new players did not.

What can be derived from the actual NCSoft statements is that PFF conversions were disappointing and gem sales were "stable" (the word used in the actual NCSoft report). That does not mean we can infer that the number of paid players who bought HoT was satisfactory. Surely those 1.5 million monthly active accounts included second, third, etc. accounts and people who check in once in a while to see if anything interesting is going on. However, there were a lot of complaints about HoT pricing, "low" number of zones, and a myriad of other reasons that were offered by players claiming they would not buy HoT. Given the revenue numbers versus "stable" gem sales, it's possible to ballpark the actual HoT sales at the time, and Healix number estimate matches mine. I would certainly be disappointed with the active account HoT purchases, though I can't speak for NCSoft or ANet. However, assuming that because they offered one reason, no other reasons apply is not good analysis. Company financial reports are always going to minimize negativity, putting the best face possible on things.

[maddoctor.2738]

@IndigoSundown.5419 said:And yet, there was a Fortune article about GW2 ESports a couple of months before HoT dropped citing 1.5 million monthly active (paid) accounts, which roughly doubled to 3 million once Play for Free hit. HoT sales were at best (at that time) a third of those paid accounts.

How did they count "active" accounts? Got a link for that article?

What can be derived from the actual NCSoft statements is that PFF conversions were disappointing and gem sales were "stable" (the word used in the actual NCSoft report).

Which is exactly what I said:

I don't remember Anet or NCsoft stating that the sales of HoT were ever disappointing. Only thing they mentioned was the conversion of free to play players into paying customers was low. Nothing about sales

I wasn't the one who drew conclusions about the lack of sales from what NCsoft/Anet said. They didn't offer any more information on that.