GW2 /whine

Gilga said:
It looks very cool.

I'm still wrapping my head around the notion of all classes being self-sufficient (e.g. no tank/healer/dps). Will be interesting to see how that plays out ... either they will have pulled off the most exquisite class balancing exercise in history OR the class differentiation will be sorta meh. Or (more likely) in practice people will end up falling into one of the roles, it just won't be as pronounced as in WoW.

The look of the game is incredible. Not just 2011 vs. 1994 graphics engine ... but it feels more steampunk than pure fantasy to me. It looks like a world (and cities) I'd like to explore.

My biggest concern is the (lack of) cost, specifically their no-monthly-fee model. The monthly fee model, at scale, provides a huge river of cash to fund content patches (or, to bank huge corporate profits). While Acti-Bliz is certainly banking healthy profits ... their MMO cost structure is roughly 50% operating income, so half is being reinvested in one way or another. So across a year ... $15 x 12 = $180 of fees. Add in a $60 x-pac box every other year or so and that's roughly $200 per user per year. $100 is profit, $100 goes back into the game.

So thought exercise translating this to GW2: first, let's assume NCsoft is ok with only 25% margins. So that means $133 revenue per user year to get to the same $100 reinvestment that Blizz has. With zero monthly fees ... that would mean two $60 boxes per year (expansions?), or three $40 boxes, or six $20 "episodes". In a 2-year span GW only got out 3 episodes and one expansion ... so i don't see how they get anywhere close to the pace they'd need to have as much development dollars available. And second, it's just so much more of a logistics hassle to manage it as boxes rather than fees. Lastly, the funding is backwards ... rather than fees "paying ahead" future development, you become dependent on box sales to pay off the development you're working on. At the crudest level, you're forced to hit deadlines to make payroll ... which isn't good for anyone.

No matter what they'll have less continuous development dollars to play with regardless of what user base scale they achieve, and so I think they'll likely get the boom-splat user curve that most other MMOs see ... rather than the steady build to a long-held plateau like WoW has done. For MMOs to keep users captive, it just requires pouring money into it. And I just don't see how GW2 will have enough money to keep it up ... whether they have a 1m, 5m, or 10m user base.
Click to expand...

TL;DR
 
It just gets worse and worse... I got excited about GW2 when they announced it in 2007.... and it's 2011 now! And with the more info they release the harder it gets to wait.
 
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