Guild Wars 2 Interview

MMORPG.com had the chance to sit down with ArenaNet lead content designer Colin Johanson during the recent New York Comic Con for a Q&A about their ambitious Guild Wars sequel. Food for thought:

MMORPG.com: So, Guild Wars 2 will use the same business model as the original Guild Wars, and with Guild Wars 2 being much larger in scope than its predecessor, it sounds like it might be a bit more challenging to pursue this business model. How are you planning to make it work?

Colin Johanson: Well, one of our hopes is that the game will sell a lot more copies, so that’ll offset the fact we’ve hired a lot more people to build it. That’s the big one. You know, at the end of the day, if we don’t make a game that sells a bunch of copies, you know, we’re in big trouble, and that’s our motivation every day, is to keep working harder and harder to build a giant game with incredible content in it, because we have to do it to keep our company in business, that’s super important to us.

We’re going to try to do some alternative business models, like microtransactions, where we sell totally optional clothing items and things, you know, we’ll go into more details on microtransactions down the road. We’ll try to sell some stuff that can help us out and are cool things that players might want, but they don’t need to play the game. And if they feel like getting that stuff, that’s great, but we’ll give them some cool options that are out there, and we’ll have some people who put some time into that stuff to make it really worthwhile.

You know whatever additional content we release down the road, be it by expansions or content packs, we don’t really know how that’s going to work yet, but we know that we have to do the same thing with the additional content we add as we do with this main game, which is that it’s gotta be amazing, or no one’s gonna buy it. And because we’re not charging a monthly fee, the only way we stay in business is by making amazing games and selling them, and that’s our only option.