Today is an exciting day for fans of Guild Wars 2, and not just because the Halloween festival just started. Along with the festival update, ArenaNet rolled out a massive change to their monetization strategy by bundling all Living World seasons with major expansions. You can read the original blog post here, but this change has some pretty interesting ramifications, including all but completely dispelling the doubts commonly held by much of the community regarding future expansions. These are what the rest of this article will focus on. Let's get right into the meat of it.
The Changes
I'm gonna restate some of what's detailed in the original blog post here, so if you've already read it, go ahead and skip to the next heading. To summarize, Living World seasons—the content releases that were mixed in between core and the first three expansions—are no longer purchasable individually in the gemstore, as they have been for years since their inception. Instead, all of them are now bundled with other content as follows:
- LW2 is now free for all players, similar to LW1. This makes sense, given the only significant content it provided were its story instances.
- LW3 and LW4 are both now part of the HoT+PoF bundle (those two have been exclusively bundled together for years; now you get all four parts in one purchase).
- IBS is now bundled with EoD.
Additionally, anyone who purchased any Living World seasons (including as part of the Elder Dragon Saga bundle) in the last month will receive a gem refund. How nice of ANet! Now, what does this all mean?
Ramifications
Improved New Player Experience
Myself and many other veteran players have been asking for years for the Living World seasons to be bundled with expansions like this. The previous system effectively encouraged players to play through the main expansions first, since those were the "main" content, and new players often wouldn't want to spend extra on Living Worlds if they weren't completely sold on the game yet. Thansk to this, they would awkwardly experience the expac narratives without the story context of the Living World seasons between them, then use gems (or gold to gem conversion) later to purchase the Living Worlds and go back to experience them and put together the full narrative puzzle. This was a very strange system, and as a result of its implementation I'd wager the majority of players experienced GW2's story out of order. It was ultimately just very inconvenient with no real benefit for players.
With the new system, experiencing the story in the proper order is incredibly convenient. LW2 being free is great, since the purchase for that season was always a pretty abysmal deal, but it also provided very essential context to understanding HoT's story. New players can now experience everything in the intended order without feeling pressured into additional purchases, and it means that the value of expansions purchases is now higher than ever. The Living Worlds were, in terms of content, basically entire expacs in their own right (except LW2), so you're now getting double the content for the same price. That's right—as of now, the expansions affected by this decision haven't increased in price at all.
More Participation in Living World Content
This new system being better for new players is grand, but let's discuss why this is also good for you—yes, you, the grumpy veteran player who doesn't care about all that. First of all, a massive portion of the playerbase just received access to the Living World zones. Many of these suffered from generally lower map populations, in large part because a significant portion of the playerbase didn't have access to them. Now, the vast majority of players will be gaining access to them, and new players will also be able to enter as they progress through the story. This should result in significantly more activity in these zones going forward.
A Bright Future For GW2
While not necessarily a tangible benefit, this decision also gives us a lot of insight into ANet's commitment to GW2. Despite the team being very clear about the fact that they aren't downsizing, have no intent of abandoning GW2, and are preparing to resume development of new expansions after GW3's release, there's still been a significant portion of the community who seem to be under the impression that these claims were either outright lies or empty promises. This decision provides ample evidence to the contrary.
If the game were being abandoned or placed into maintenance mode, a change like this is the last thing you'd expect the team to make in a million years. Abandoned MMORPGs only remain running for as long as their earnings—usually through the in-game cash shop—continue to bring in profit over the costs of server maintenance. There are some companies, like Gamigo, which are infamous for the practice of acquiring dying MMOs and leaving them running as barely profitable corpses; this fate befell my poor, beloved RIFT.
If you're planning to sunset an MMO in this fashion, though, you'd want to leave it in as profitable a state as possible; this is why these abandoned MMOs often tend to have lots of pay-to-win items and other predatory purchases added to their shops right before they're put into maintenance mode. GW2, on the other hand, just did the exact opposite. By bundling Living Worlds with expansions, ANet just took away one of their own revenue streams, and a pretty significant one at that. They're no longer making money off of this content at all, except if it encourages someone to buy the new bundles. This decision exclusively benefits players and the long-term health of the game while reducing the game's short-term profitability.
In short, this is the sort of decision a company would only ever make if they were very confident in their game's future. They've decided that making GW2 more enticing to new players is a better business decision than making as much money as possible from their existing playerbase, and the only logical conclusion based on that decision is that the team is in a good spot financially and have explicit intentions on continuing to grow and support the game for a long time.
The Astral Ward Saga
After EoD's release, all of the game's content up to that point—the first three expansions and all the Living Worlds—were bundled together into a package called the Elder Dragon Saga. Based on the existence of a three-expansion-long "saga" with a near narrative ending, many players have assumed that the series of three expansions we got afterwards—SotO, JaWi, and VoE—were also a narrative saga of their own, with many calling it the "Wizard Saga". The creation of the new Astral Ward Saga all but confirms this, and lends heavy credence to the idea that the post-GW3 expansions may be a new, third narrative saga. We'll have to wait and see.
Conclusion
This was an incredible and, if I may be so bold, long-overdue move by ANet. GW2 is in a better state than ever, and this decision makes me even more confident than before in its future. As soon as I saw the news, I knew I had to quickly put together an article, in particular because I wanted to get across that third point.
This community has always been full of more than its share of doomers, and there's no shortage of people who've never even played the game but are salivating at the thought of its downfall, too. I've been seeing the sentiment that the coming expansions after GW3 are just "wishful thinking" or outright lies become more and more popular, so it's nice to have a move from ANet itself that pretty soundly proves that wrong. I hope everyone's as excited as I am to see what this game has in store going forward. Until next time!
Comments
Post a Comment