What A Difference A Day Makes : GW2

It's not been the greatest twenty-four hours. I had some bad news about my health yesterday that's going to have a significant impact on my life over the next few months, at least. Before my hospital appointment I spent the morning playing EverQuest 2, which kept my mind off the prospect of a procedure I wasn't much looking forward to.

When I got back from the hospital, having received the news I was hoping to avoid, I settled into doing my dailies in Guild Wars 2 and then spent the rest of the evening in World vs World. It very much helped to settle my mood. Generally I don't play MMOs to escape problems in real life but I have to say that, when such problems occur, those virtual worlds do offer an attractive alternative.

This morning I woke up feeling fairly sanguine. I hope to be reasonably pragmatic about health problems and while I'd rather not have any to worry about, if I do then I'm all in favor of having  something done about them as soon as possible. Now I just have to wait for that to happen.

In that mood I sat down to read Feedly, where I found this bombshell waiting for me. The headline reads

"Guild Wars 2 studio ArenaNet is suffering heavy layoffs, but the game will continue".

Well, that's surprising, disturbing and incredibly unreassuring...

There's a good amount of detail in the MassivelyOP report and also in this GamesIndustryBiz piece. The gist is this:

• ArenaNet is not performing well enough commercially for NCSoft's liking.
• The underlying reason is a combination of decreasing income from aging franchises and insufficient progress on expensive new projects.
• There will be a round of significant lay-offs.
• Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 will continue on their present course. 

Songyee Yoon, CEO of NCSoft, summed up the problem:

"Our live game business revenue is declining as our franchises age, delays in development on PC and mobile have created further drains against our revenue projects, while our operating costs in the west have increased. Where we are is not sustainable, and is not going to set us up for future success."

ArenaNet themselves issued this bland statement on the forums:

"We know you have a lot of questions about the future of Guild Wars 2. We want to share with you what to expect moving forward for the game. First and foremost, we are still fully committed to all of our players and ongoing support of the game. We will be moving directly from Living World Season 4 into Season 5 as promised, and we plan to continue a regular cadence of updates and releases.

We know Guild Wars 2 is important to you, and as our players, you are important to us. Rest assured that we are still working to add great new content to the game. We are deeply grateful to all of you for your support during this difficult time."

Reaction on the official forums is, as yet, muted. There's a fairly short thread filled with some astonishingly smug, uninformed or plain self-deceiving comments, largely from people who seem to know little or nothing about NCSoft or its relationship to ArenaNet. Or about reality, for that matter.

Taken together with the recent layoffs at Blizzard and the speculation that kicked off about the future of World of Warcraft,  it's clear that neither size nor market presence gives much of an indicator towards stability or longevity. WoW is the biggest MMORPG of all and GW2 would probably have featured in many people's top ten most-successful current MMORPGs in the west; maybe top five.

I'll get to GW2 in a moment, but in more general terms I think what underpins both Blizzard and NCSoft's actions has more to do with the impending and inevitable decline of the PC gaming market than a decline in interest in the MMO(RPG) genre itself.  For a long time, MMOs were intrinsically bound up with the platform upon which they ran and that platform was almost exclusively the desktop computer. A handful of games were devised for consoles and there have been mobile MMOs as long as we've had smartphones, but until recently almost everything of significance in the MMORPG field came to us via the PC.

That's no longer true. We read all the time about MMOs being converted for consoles. It's pretty much expected now. Some are created for consoles first then ported to PC.

Mobile is booming. The quantity and quality of MMORPGs available for handheld devices increases every day. And, of course, mobile gaming is becoming not just more profitable than any other platform but vastly so.

At sixty years of age, and particularly with reminders of my own mortality fresh in my mind, I'm starting to feel hesitant about the sweeping statements I've been prone to make in the past about this or that MMORPG outliving me. That's beginning to look like an increasingly weak assurance either for me or the games.

If I stick to straight numbers, though, I'm beginning to question how long the ordinary person will be able to buy a new desktop personal computer. Ten years? Probably. Twenty years? Not sure about that. Thirty? I really doubt it. When the home desktop PC becomes a curiosity of the past, where will that leave the MMORPG?

While I do believe that some MMORPGs, as we now know them, will continue to be available virtually indefinitely, what devices they'll be developed to run on is a lot harder to predict. Trying to see things from the point of view of major games developers, planning for the next five years, it's getting ever harder to imagine major resources being directed towards the combination of a genre and a platform both in evident decline.

Getting back to Guild Wars 2, information coming out as a result of yesterday's news confirms an awful lot of things some of us had been speculating about for a year or two. It's been extremely hard to explain how a company with around 400 employees could be so unproductive, so unresponsive and just so all-round slow.

If most of those people had been working on Guild Wars 2 then you'd have been well within your rights as a customer to ask what the heck they were all doing. The explanation, as many long suspected, is that a lot of them weren't working on either of ANet's Live games at all.

Jessica Price, the GW2 writer who was sacked last year after a very public row, confirmed that while she was still with the company ANet were working on "two major projects", one of which was "indefinitely suspended" even before she was fired.

She also made a very telling statement about what was going on at GW2 while she was still working there:

"For those of us working on GW2, our mandate was essentially to make it look like there was the same level of resources devoted to GW2, when they were actually steadily moving people off of it onto the other projects."

Smoke and mirrors, as many of us suspected. So, where does all this leave Guild Wars 2 players?  That's quite hard to say.

The real concern for anyone hoping to go on playing GW2 for years to come is NCSoft. If ArenaNet was an independent company that had made some poor decisions on future projects and been forced to retrench, we could expect a renewed focus on the one game that does make money. We could expect, as many in the forum thread seem to do, that some of the resources diverted to unnanounced projects would be returned to the core game.

In that scenario, we might even see an improvement in the GW2 experience. Faster response times, shorter content droughts, more attention on meeting cutomer expectations. We might even get an expansion this side of forever.

And, if ANet was an independent company, should things get truly bad we could look forward to an eventual transfer of assets. The Guild Wars franchise might change ownership in a merger or even in some end-of-life fire sale, as we have seen happen to so many other familiar names in recent times. That would ensure at least a few more years.

With ANet being a wholly-owned subsidiary of NCSoft, however, you can forget all of that. The sad fates of both City of Heroes and WildStar tell us that NCSoft has no interest in selling IPs to other potential competitors. If they close ANet, that will be the end of the Guild Wars franchise.

In the short term I'm sure GW2 will persist. NCSoft has culled everything at ArenaNet that doesn't directly support the two Guild Wars titles. The recent, utterly unexpected re-launch of the support website for the original Guild Wars suggests there may even be plans to monetize the older game again.

There are firm statements that planned content will roll out, so I would expect to see Living Story Season Five conclude. That should keep the lights on for the rest of this year. After that, if nothing else has changed, I would expect a final throw of the dice with the announcement of a third expansion.

Looking any further ahead seems futile. At that point it would depend on unknown and unknowable factors including the commercial success or otherwise of that expansion, the health of the PC-based MMORPG market in general and how well NCSoft is doing overall.

GW2 will turn eight years old this summer. Right now, I wouldn't count on GW2 being around for its tenth anniversary. This time yesterday I wouldn't have said that. A lot can change in a day.