Guild Wars 2 suffers huge delay

By Robert Purchese Published 16 February, 2009

MMO sequel now "TBA 2010/11".

NCsoft has pushed the launch of Guild Wars 2 back to "TBA 2010/2011".

Word comes from financial 2008 roundup papers (spotted by Voodoo Extreme), although there's no reason for the hefty delay. Yet.

Guild Wars 2 had, once upon a time, been pencilled in for launch last year. So far, however, we've seen nothing of the sequel, just heard tidbits of projected features and word there will be no early-days beta - ArenaNet feels there's much more riding on Guild Wars 2.

Whether that means the game design has changed from the level limit-less original concept ideas, we don't know. But all we do know can be found on our Guild Wars 2 gamepage.

Interestingly, the same NCsoft financial report shows Guild Wars 1 has 5.8 million active account as of December 2008. The MMO is free-to-play, however - the only costs involved are buying the game/expansions.

Active account-counts for NCsoft's other MMOs are not given. We do, though, know the highest concurrent user count for each month: Aion had 238,181 people, Lineage had 162,328, Lineage II had 109,850 and City of Heroes/Villains had 13,823.

Most of the traffic and sales come from Korea, and NCsoft makes over half its sales revenue from the Lineage series alone.

Aion will launch across Europe and North America by the end of the year.

Our Aion: The Tower of Eternity gamepage has much more information on.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (13) Latest comment 3 years ago

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  • DFawkes #1 3 years ago

    Thank goodness for that. I'm barely part way into Prophecies, I need bucketloads of time until I'm ready to move onto GW2. I still have 2 full campaigns, the rest of Prophecies, and Eye of the North, as well as special events and PvP to deal with first.

  • Kazzahdrane #2 3 years ago

    Wow, had no idea that City of Heroes/Villains had such low player numbers. Great that it still gets coverage on sites and in magazines, though.

  • stepneg #3 3 years ago

    Gutted, was looking forward to GW2 this year.

  • sneetch #4 3 years ago

    Shirley some mistake with the COH/COV numbers there? Do you mind if I call you Shirley?

  • Chris Gardiner #5 3 years ago

    Bum!

  • ZuluHero #6 3 years ago

    Really looking forward to GW2, but glad to see there's still a healthy user base for GW1. Ive recently gotten back into it, trying to finish Factions and Nightfall storylines after having already completed Prophecies (to how many MMOs can you say that you've "completed" them? ;)).

    Im not too upset by the delay - im looking foward to AION in the meantime. I am a little disappointed that this was pushed to the end of the year, esp. after its already been released in Korea.
    Edited by 1 at 16/02/09 @ 11:07

  • 4thVariety #7 3 years ago

    Previous quarterly reports always featured the exact amount of people playing. This time NC soft used a few tricks.

    They only published the highest number of people who played at the same time during the last 3 months. CoH has more than 15k players, that was just the maximum of people who played at once. Look up Q3-08 to get pinpoint precision numbers for all NC MMOs. Why they did it is a mystery, maybe Aion looks strongest that way.

    The GW number is not the number of accounts, but the number of boxed copies sold. If you own all four parts, then you will be counted four times in that number. Since GW has no additional fees, that number is the most important one anyway. 6 Million units sold on the PC is quite an achievement any way you look at it.

  • iokthemonkey #8 3 years ago

    Yeah, they're not "cheating" when they list the number of GW players - after all, it's not subscription-based so it's a bit like querying Half-Life 2's sales figures for not being "active subscribers."

    The thing a lot of people miss is that GW - in terms of bandwidth usage - is nowhwere near as intense as something like WoW. The only time there's any "MMO-ish" content is when you're in a city. In effect the cities are just lobbies and most of the game is played locally anyway, which will probably save them a fortune in overheads...

  • 4thVariety #9 3 years ago

    If you look closely you can see what it costs NCsoft to run all their sever and internet bills for 3 months. It's $1.5 million for all MMOs and all websites combined..

    The hosting and bandwidth costs for running an MMO are next to nothing. It's an urban myth that the subscription costs come from server costs.

    You can read it in the business report for yourself. It lists all the costs of running their business. Server costs are negligible.

  • strelok #10 3 years ago

    how is that a huge delay when the game was originally scheduled for 2010?

  • Raziel #11 3 years ago

    @strelok
    The original date was a Beta in the end of 08 and a release somewhere in 2009.
    Now it won't even be announced untill next year.

    I just hope they add more stuff to Guild Wars, the wait between GW2 and Eye of the North will be a bit too long...

  • Slipstream #12 3 years ago

    AION...I hope it's as good as they claim.

  • Malixu #13 3 years ago

    > Guild Wars 2 had, once upon a time, been pencilled in for launch last year.

    No it wasn't. It was pencilled in a for a beta in late 2008, with no talk of launch until at least 2009.