Guild Wars 2 – Interview

Bilderstrecke

After the announcement of Guild Wars 2 and the expansion Eye of the North there was a lot of excitement within the Guild Wars community. But more than that there were a lot of questions. So we picked up the phone and called everyone at Arena.net who could give us the answers.

And here we go: Jeff Strain (Co-Founder of Arena.net and Programmer), Mike O'Brien (Co-Founder of Arena.net and Programmer), Ben Miller (Game Designer) and Christopher Lye (Director of Marketing NCSoft) gave us a lot of insights into Guild Wars 2.

For the German version of the interview please click here.

gamona: Rumors about Guild Wars not being profitable are still alive, although you sold an impressive number of copies. Is it really possible to run an MMO just out of box sales income?

Arena.net: If you sell 3 million of anything, nearly every business model is profitable (laughs). Serious: Guild Wars has been designed from base to support a no cost model. Not having a monthly fee is something we're going to keep in any circumstance.

Jeff Strain, Co-Founder and Programmer, currently leads the production and art teams for Guild Wars. Prior to the founding of ArenaNet, Jeff was the team lead and lead programmer of Blizzard's massively multiplayer role-playing game, World of Warcraft. He was also a senior programmer on both Warcraft III and StarCraft, and a programmer on Diablo. Jeff was the creator of the StarCraft Campaign Editor and was employed at Blizzard for four years. Guild Wars is a huge success for us and introducing a monthly fee would be a complete breach with our philosophy. Of course an MMO produces more costs than a standard offline game, which you just have to sell and then can nearly forget about follow up costs. But on the other hand, it's not really THAT expensive - even if this is common belief.

And as you can probably imagine, companies running MMO which have to be paid for on a regular basis are quite happy if everyone thinks they have huge costs. (laughs) Having a no cost model gives us the additional advantage of not having to implement new content by all means just to keep people playing (and paying) to remain profitable.

If someone wants you take a break (and possibly come back again at a later date) that's perfectly fine for us and we don't have to worry about losing a paying customer.