Guild Wars Factions Q&A
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Q: You're running an MMO without a subscription fee, and using an episodic content model instead - but it seems that basically, you're accepting less revenue for providing an MMO service than other firms are, since many of them release paid-for expansion packs as well as charging a monthly fee. How do you justify that, economically?
A: First of all, it costs us far less to operate Guild Wars than a traditional MMO. The technology team behind our server technology is the team that built the original Battle.net. At that time, there was no broadband, so the whole thing was built around 28.8 modem assumptions - so we learned a tremendous amount about latency masking and bandwidth optimisation. When we built the core network technology behind Arena.net, of which Guild Wars is one game that uses that technology, it was really designed with those principles in mind. Even though we knew that broadband was growing and that most people would have it, we wanted to make a game that was very bandwidth-light, because we knew from the beginning that we were not going to charge a subscription fee, and that - bandwidth - is one of your primary operating costs. Obviously you pay for the server infrastructure up front, but your ongoing cost is bandwidth, and we use substantially less bandwidth than almost any online game out there. So, right up front, we've cut our support cost that way.
The other big factor, though, and by far the larger factor, is that we just think that if you have a game that requires a subscription fee, you're going to have fewer customers. Obviously, there are examples out there of very big MMOs that have done well and have lots of customers - but they're building on established franchises and large existing customer bases. Guild Wars was a new product, and we wanted to come out of the gate really strongly and capture a very large number of players right off the bat. We just believed that we could be more effective at that without a subscription fee. With a subscription fee, you're going to cut twenty, thirty, forty, maybe even sixty per cent of your total potential customers right off the bat.
So our goal is to create this game, create this business model, have a large and thriving community - and then sell content directly to them. Really, if you think about it, if I make two games a year and I do a good job, make sure that they're really cool and really strong, and that you want to buy them; that's about the same as what I would get if I was paying a subscription fee for one game over that year. You're right, it's a little bit less - but fundamentally, it's in the same ballpark. So, that's our goal - make sure that we make enough content, that it's cool enough, fun enough, and released on a regular schedule, so that we're just as profitable and can support the game to the same degree that a traditional MMO can.
