Sales Q3 2023
GW2 sales appear to be almost unaffected by the SotO release (2023-08-22) . Not looking good.
Sales Q3 2022 for comparison
EoD release (2022-02-28) was in Q1 2022 and sales didn’t significantly increase before Q2 2022. Similar to PoF (2017-09-22) where it also took until the next quarter (Q4 2017) for sales to really pick up (almost 35K million). So maybe there is hope, i. e. how many people did you tell that they should buy SotO after you have played it?
Source: https://kr.ncsoft.com/en/ir/irArchive/earningsRelease.do
Compared to pre-HoT numbers: https://i.imgur.com/Vgd7ejp.png
It’s sad to see GW2 being barely able to scratch even the pre-HoT numbers of twelve month of content drought. Never mind the pre-HoT numbers during active content deployment. Took them almost ten years after their bait-and-switch.
I like this/your illustration with colors indicating the expansion releases:
It’s very interesting to also look at the quarter after each expansion release which I would read as follows:
- HoT was hyped very much, but wasn’t very well received. Many players probably found it too hard (before HoT difficulty nerfs and power creep from later expansions) and told their friends about it.
- PoF wasn’t hyped very much, but was very well received. People loved their mounts and spread the word.
- EoD+Steam was … I don’t know.
Yeah, it’s much more interesting that way and a curious thing that you don’t find those numbers anywhere anymore. It’s also from interest that almost the entire 2014 numbers are during a complete and utter stop of content deployment. Almost 12 month of absolute 0 content updates in favour to rush out HoT. And it still had better numbers than everything that came afterwards up to EoD.
Though it’s revenue . Squeezing more out of less players can highten the revenue as well, and Anet got nuked from orbit by NCSoft pre-EoD.
Switching from big social open world bosses to strict coordinated instanced content. Drastic spike in difficulty in favour of a shift away from chill casual content. General WoWification like trinity and quests quest-like achievement-structure. Didn’t go over well with the playerbase, and took them almost ten years to barely recover from it, if one is desperate enough to use the drought numbers as a bar instead of the pre-drought ones.
… quest-like achievement-structure.
With the worst being task collections which have to be completed in order, e. g. Frode’s Journal which even forces you to do/repeat the 3 SotO metas in a specific order or it doesn’t count,
W T F !
I think that GW2 already lost it’s way/innocence very early on when ArenaNet listened to a vocal minority of players who wanted WoW-like progression and instanced content … which lead to Fractals and Ascended Gear with Agony Infusions and later with HoT even to Raids.
I mean, there’s nothing wrong with people enjoying this type of content. I hear that WoW is very much alive and – according to MightyTeapot – Mythic+ is even better than Fractals. Funny enough, he also says that he is playing WoW as an Instance Simulator (and not as an MMO).
What I fiind kinda sad is that ArenaNet didn’t have the balls (or chance?) to stick with their original vision of what an MMO should be like and instead tried to be more like WoW.
