I Have a Serious Question

[Adry.7512]

GW2 is highly populated, I never see an event that is empty or with few players. The game is always active and always packed. I see all players rocking the new gem store items. so I honestly can’t stop wondering, why are the quarterly income stats so low? How is that possible?

[Mewcifer.5198]

A lot of people convert gold to gems to purchase items.

[Adry.7512]

@Mewcifer.5198 said:A lot of people convert gold to gems to purchase items.

That would explain a lot.

[Tekoneiric.6817]

There are a lot of long term players who have a fairly stead in game income so they convert a lot of gold to gems which is why conversion rates are so high going from gold to gems. I remember years ago when the conversion rate was in the 60 something gold for 400 gems. They need a steady stream of new players coming to the game to increase the revenue but most of the marketing I've seen is aimed at existing players. I personally would like to see them branch out more into other funding sources like toys, books, comics and even venture into media. They have a prime property that could easily be converted to serialized animation and live action shows. They could even do personalized novels where a player's choices in their favorite character go to generate a novel that the player could purchase.

[Solvar.7953]

Players also do not need to buy anything (beyond the game itself) to play. So there could be lots of players that are just not buying much stuff. Since Anet tries to avoid pay to win, most everything in the gem store is either cosmetics or convenience.I personally care less about cosmetic aspects, so that is about 90% of the gem store I ignore. I've bought pretty much all of the convenience items/features I need. So at this point, I play the game, but there really isn't anything in the gemstore that I feel like buying.Other players may be in a similar situation, or financially can not afford to buy much.Note that other that AP rewards and birthday rewards, the only way gems get put into the game is buy people buying them with real money. So while some players may be buying gems with gold they earned, it also means that someone bought those gems and is selling them in exchange for that gold. So the gold <-> gem exchange means Anet is still getting money, it is just less direct.

[Fenella.2634]

Gold to gems does not mean less revenue, since those gems have been bought by someone with real money before.

However, in EU to this day many people simply can't buy any gems without going through support tickets first. It's like Anet doesn't really want our money. :lol:There's some persistent problem with the transfer service they are still using, idk.

[Danikat.8537]

One important point to remember is we don't see how much money Anet gets in. All we see is how much of the profit is passed on to their parent company (NCSoft). Because Anet is a wholly owned subsidiary and not publicly traded they don't need to report their own finances openly like NCSoft does. That means we only get one small part of the picture - one quarters profits could be lower because there's less gem store sales, or because Anet are keeping back more of the money for something else, like hiring more staff or upgrading their PCs or something. We don't really have enough information to judge how they're doing financially, only what proportion of their parent companies profits they contribute.

[misterman.1530]

@"Solvar.7953" said:Players also do not need to buy anything (beyond the game itself) to play. So there could be lots of players that are just not buying much stuff. Since Anet tries to avoid pay to win, most everything in the gem store is either cosmetics or convenience.I personally care less about cosmetic aspects, so that is about 90% of the gem store I ignore. I've bought pretty much all of the convenience items/features I need. So at this point, I play the game, but there really isn't anything in the gemstore that I feel like buying.Other players may be in a similar situation, or financially can not afford to buy much.Note that other that AP rewards and birthday rewards, the only way gems get put into the game is buy people buying them with real money. So while some players may be buying gems with gold they earned, it also means that someone bought those gems and is selling them in exchange for that gold. So the gold <-> gem exchange means Anet is still getting money, it is just less direct.

I'm with you there. I did, early on, use the gem store to purchase skins - basically to support Anet. But after a while, I realized it was better just to get the utility items (keys, Metabolic Primers, etc., salvage tools) than it was to buy things to make my characters or mounts look different. And I never understood "chairs". Seriously?

[Yggranya.5201]

@misterman.1530 said:

@"Solvar.7953" said:Players also do not need to buy anything (beyond the game itself) to play. So there could be lots of players that are just not buying much stuff. Since Anet tries to avoid pay to win, most everything in the gem store is either cosmetics or convenience.I personally care less about cosmetic aspects, so that is about 90% of the gem store I ignore. I've bought pretty much all of the convenience items/features I need. So at this point, I play the game, but there really isn't anything in the gemstore that I feel like buying.Other players may be in a similar situation, or financially can not afford to buy much.Note that other that AP rewards and birthday rewards, the only way gems get put into the game is buy people buying them with real money. So while some players may be buying gems with gold they earned, it also means that someone bought those gems and is selling them in exchange for that gold. So the gold <-> gem exchange means Anet is still getting money, it is just less direct.

And I never understood "chairs". Seriously?

You can sit on them! They glow! How cool is that?! /s

[Astralporing.1957]

@"Adry.7512" said:GW2 is highly populated, I never see an event that is empty or with few players. The game is always active and always packed. I see all players rocking the new gem store items. so I honestly can’t stop wondering, why are the quarterly income stats so low? How is that possible?Remember, that, first, people tend to congregate in the same places (just go play for a while in any map you usually don't go to, and you will see what i mean), and, second, the map population caps at 150. The result of both is that you may perceive the game as being "always active and always packed" and not notice that it's only, say, several thousand players. So, it's extremely hard to see how exactly the game is doing just by looking at how active some open world maps and events are. It's entirely possible, then, that the perception you're getting from observing the game from the inside doesn't fully match the reality.

[maddoctor.2738]

@Adry.7512 said:GW2 is highly populated, I never see an event that is empty or with few players. The game is always active and always packed. I see all players rocking the new gem store items. so I honestly can’t stop wondering, why are the quarterly income stats so low? How is that possible?

Quarterly income reflects game SALES as well as gem store performance. If you take a look at the revenue reports for Guild Wars 2 you can see that some of the drops in revenue happened around changes to how they sell the game and its expansions. Which isn't exactly a coincidence. Although it might not be visible, or talked about, on these forums, a part of the revenue comes from game sales, and those are likely to suffer when there are price cuts.

[Super Hayes.6890]

@Yggranya.5201 said:

@misterman.1530 said:

@"Solvar.7953" said:Players also do not need to buy anything (beyond the game itself) to play. So there could be lots of players that are just not buying much stuff. Since Anet tries to avoid pay to win, most everything in the gem store is either cosmetics or convenience.I personally care less about cosmetic aspects, so that is about 90% of the gem store I ignore. I've bought pretty much all of the convenience items/features I need. So at this point, I play the game, but there really isn't anything in the gemstore that I feel like buying.Other players may be in a similar situation, or financially can not afford to buy much.Note that other that AP rewards and birthday rewards, the only way gems get put into the game is buy people buying them with real money. So while some players may be buying gems with gold they earned, it also means that someone bought those gems and is selling them in exchange for that gold. So the gold <-> gem exchange means Anet is still getting money, it is just less direct.

And I never understood "chairs". Seriously?

You can sit on them! They glow! How cool is that?! /s

This guy understands chairs!

It feels like the game is doing well. I doubt they would be planning an expansion pack if they felt the game was tanking. I mean it's eight years old and they are in expansion mode.

[Solvar.7953]

I feel some of the reason for an expansion pack is that it makes a lot of money. Most of the players currently playing will hand over the $40 for the expansion pack when it comes up, but probably don't spend $40/month on gw2. For the 2 expansions released, there was a noticeable increase in revenue for the quarter that the expansion was released.Expansions sometimes also create new areas for them to make money (mount skins from PoF for example). Some bigger features may be also hard to get into a LS update.

[Jobber.6348]

It's because there is simply nothing that can't be paid with gold.

The Gemstore is mostly just cosmetics because even by playing regularly, yu can get a Black Lion consumable through Daily Login rewards (as such I have gotten myself a filled bank tab of Black Lion Salvage kits and over 1000 repair cans/revival orbs/teleports in total)

Keys can be farmed weekly by making an alt and levelling them up to 10, and Black Lion Chests drop from practically everywhere.

With 80% of yur game funded by cosmetics and people showing little to no interest in cosmetics, it's not surprising that Gw2 draws in so little income.What the game really earns money off is Expansions, and we have been begging for one since last Living World, and they are finally doing it now.

They have to make the next Expansion worth buying and make sure it sells to get a major boost in players to survive because at our current pace, game is gonna die.

[Thornwolf.9721]

@"Yasai.3549" said:It's because there is simply nothing that can't be paid with gold.

The Gemstore is mostly just cosmetics because even by playing regularly, yu can get a Black Lion consumable through Daily Login rewards (as such I have gotten myself a filled bank tab of Black Lion Salvage kits and over 1000 repair cans/revival orbs/teleports in total)

Keys can be farmed weekly by making an alt and levelling them up to 10, and Black Lion Chests drop from practically everywhere.

With 80% of yur game funded by cosmetics and people showing little to no interest in cosmetics, it's not surprising that Gw2 draws in so little income.What the game really earns money off is Expansions, and we have been begging for one since last Living World, and they are finally doing it now.

They have to make the next Expansion worth buying and make sure it sells to get a major boost in players to survive because at our current pace, game is gonna die.

And it can't be like the last two who albeit did good on release did NOT do well for the community so it hurt their immediate sales afterwords. It also is gonna need a hell of a selling point to beat mounts; So Im not sure what and how and where they are gonna find that unicorn. Im not sure what could be bigger than the mounts they gave us, unless they go for something they said they'd "never do" again. Of which there is a whole list of things, and a host of questions that come along with them~

• Guild stuff, whether it be halls or guild vs guild hoohaah (maybe even alliances...eh.. EH? See what I... ok Ill see myself out...)
• New race (AHAHAHAHA!!! Takes effort, likely wont happen on that alone.)
• New class (Second verse same as the first.)
• New weapons (Could be likely, given that new weapons could be E-spec weapons thus it means they are TRULY special to that E-spec at least for a bit.)
• More WvW /PvP maps that you gotta pay to get into?

Not a huge list but it does exist, there are things in all of those categories that have been spoken at length about on the forums. A bigger note is what we know we will likely get, and given the underwater skimmer update in a day or two we have more to go on.

1. Underwater/revamp/content/overhaul/new stuff <==== they wouldn't make a mount capable of underwater travel, if they didn't intend to use it. And current game lacks the environment in bulk for it to be used effectively and purposefully as it would be a waste of dev time if they simply left us with what we have now.
2. E-specs
3. New regions/zones/events/whatever hooohaah like maybe even bounties AND meta's.
4. Masteries of some sort
5. Cosmetics
6. Stat sets
7. new runes
8. and three different editions, all with different and varying levels of E-peen wanky spanky swag.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

Alot of players seem to be misunderstanding how gold to gems works here. Its not just "free items", a player can only buy gems with gold that another player has bought with real money, that's why its a currency exchange, and why the rates keep going up over time.

The feature wouldn't even work if no one paid for gems because the starting rate would be unobtainable.

Yes you can grind ten times longer for that same item to keep up with the increasing rate, but by doing so you're also increasing profit for ArenaNet because player count and playtime means alot to investors, even if it seems like "leeching" to you.

[mercury ranique.2170]

Microtransactions where brought to mmo's by arenanet (they where among the first to do it on this scale), but they never wanted to push it too far and it is still something to create additional revenue. The main source of revenue is for sales of the game. Between expansion these are low and the tot revenue depends on spikes around major releases.

[maddoctor.2738]

@"Hannelore.8153" said:Alot of players seem to be misunderstanding how gold to gems works here. Its not just "free items", a player can only buy gems with gold that another player has bought with real money, that's why its a currency exchange, and why the rates keep going up over time.

The feature wouldn't even work if no one paid for gems because the starting rate would be unobtainable.

Yes you can grind ten times longer for that same item to keep up with the increasing rate, but by doing so you're also increasing profit for ArenaNet because player count and playtime means alot to investors, even if it seems like "leeching" to you.

It's also worth nothing that despite the "everyone buys things with gold" argument, on average the gold needed to buy gems has been going down from March until August, meaning players weren't really using gold to buy things on the gem store. The value is now going up thanks to the anniversary sale, at this point players DO buy gems with gold to take advantage of the sale.

[kharmin.7683]

@Solvar.7953 said:Most of the players currently playing will hand over the $40 for the expansion pack when it comes up, but probably don't spend $40/month on gw2.::raiseshand::

[Tere.4759]

@Yggranya.5201 said:

@"misterman.1530" said:And I never understood "chairs". Seriously?

You can sit on them! They glow! How cool is that?! /s

Now wait a minute, I love the jackal chair. It's awesome. I just wished it changed to match my jackal skins. :(

[Adry.7512]

@Danikat.8537 said:One important point to remember is we don't see how much money Anet gets in. All we see is how much of the profit is passed on to their parent company (NCSoft). Because Anet is a wholly owned subsidiary and not publicly traded they don't need to report their own finances openly like NCSoft does. That means we only get one small part of the picture - one quarters profits could be lower because there's less gem store sales, or because Anet are keeping back more of the money for something else, like hiring more staff or upgrading their PCs or something. We don't really have enough information to judge how they're doing financially, only what proportion of their parent companies profits they contribute.

This was very informative, thank you!

[Anchoku.8142]

The quarterly financial report did not look very good to me as COVID's "stay at home" effect only returned GW2 revenue to 2019's level.

The gold-gem exchange is supposed to be supply and demand to increase gem price in terms of game gold when more players are exchanging gold. This will make gems appear cheaper for real money conversion and influence the percent population willing to trade real money. Gold-gem conversion also removes gold from the economy like crafting does. However, the BLTP has to offer attractive items to spend gems on or gold will accumulate making gems cheaper and fewer players will spend real money. This will result in less capital for creating new content, which leads to a destructive feedback loop. Demand for gems has to be high as well as for gold and materials.

An expac with major client innovation and content sold only in real money or an enormous amount of gems would help with real revenue.