Guild Wars 2 Sold 3.5+ Million Copies, Fastest Selling MMO in History

To celebrate the one year anniversary of Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet has put together a blog retrospective with some impressive stats: not only has the game apparently sold more than 3.5 million copies, but it’s also the fastest-selling MMO in history. Given Guild Wars 2 uses a “buy to play” business models there are no subscription numbers, but the infographic mentions that the title has had, at one point, 460,000 players online at one time.

Here’s a snip from the retrospective part of the article:

Those of you who have been with us from the beginning will recall that our first goal with Guild Wars 2 was to make a truly dynamic world where the actions of players change the world around them. We had railed against traditional MMO mechanics like quest chains that force the world to be static and unchanging, and instead had built a world full of dynamic events where players working together can actually change the state of the world. We knew we wanted to use live updates to make the world even more dynamic. And we knew that in order to really succeed at that, we’d have to be able to ship new content into the world at an unprecedented scale.

So in this first year we’ve ramped up to make Guild Wars 2 the best-supported, most-updated online world in the industry. And if you ask me what stands out most about our first year, I’ll tell you, I think the number one thing we accomplished was reorienting our company to be able to update the game so much. In the first eight months after launch we shipped eight major releases, and then in the subsequent four months we shipped eight more major releases. We’re releasing new content every two weeks. Think about the power of that. We’re now updating Guild Wars 2 about five times as often as the typical MMO.

As we start to hit our stride with these releases, and as millions of players log in to participate in these world-changing events, you can see a kind of magic start to happen. The line between dynamic events and live updates starts to blur. The world really is changing all the time, and there’s always something new to see and do. Players join forces by the hundreds to answer each challenge, whether it’s the invasion of Scarlet’s army or the onslaught of Tequatl the Sunless or the fight over Stonemist Castle.

We want to involve you in shaping these world changes. Recently you elected Ellen Kiel to the Captain’s Council, along with her promise to research a Fractal dungeon about the Thaumanova Reactor Explosion. That means you directly decided what content ArenaNet is building for Guild Wars 2 for release later this year. In the coming year you’ll see more and more how your choices and actions in Tyria will permanently change the world.

It’s exciting. With so many forces at play, who can predict how the world of Tyria will have changed by this time next year? I can’t wait.