Guild Wars 2 crosses 1 million in sales prior to launch

Guild Wars 2 crosses 1 million in sales prior to launch

Tue 28 Aug 2012 8:58pm GMT / 4:58pm EDT / 1:58pm PDT
Games Online

ArenaNet's pre-purchase HeadStart program pays off

ArenaNet

NCsoft

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Publisher NCsoft and developer ArenaNet have announced that Guild Wars 2 has already sold 1 million units prior to the game's official launch today. Pre-purchasing the game gave consumers access to the 3-day HeadStart that began on Friday.

"This is the culmination of a 5-year journey and to be greeted by this level of enthusiasm by our fans is truly amazing," said Mike O'Brien, president and co-founder of ArenaNet. "But really our work is just beginning. Now our focus is shifting to building on this living world we've delivered, continuously refining our game and improving services to ensure our players have the best possible experience."

During the HeadStart weekend, Guild Wars 2 also had more than 400,000 players online at once. Guild Wars 2 is available today for purchase at the official site or other retailers.

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7 Comments

Nicholas Pantazis
Senior Editor

I'm one of them. ::)

It's a great game, and more fun than I've had in an MMO since the early days of WoW. Kudos to ArenaNet. Keep up the good work and I'll keep paying.

Posted:8 months ago

#1

Jay Trindall
QA

Rockstar Lincoln

Agreed, huge fun, great game. Probably my favourite MMO to date.

Posted:8 months ago

#2

Andreas Gschwari
Lead Designer / Lead Level Designer / Designer

Avalanche Studios

Compare this with 200k sales of The Secret World.

Posted:8 months ago

#3

And they loose money on the platform strategy. I would love to play GW2, but there is no way Im touching a PC again.
Any projects for Mac, PS3 ou Xbox ?

Posted:8 months ago

#4

Nicholas Pantazis
Senior Editor

@ Hugo Lol what? PC is fricken huge. There are a lot more people on Steam right now than there are on Xbox Live, and a number of PC games outsell their console counterparts (Portal 2, Skyrim - which at least outsold the PS3 version and probably will outsell the 360 version). Even if that weren't true for other games, for MMOs PC is king, lord, and emperor and trust me, they're not losing a penny on this game.

Posted:8 months ago

#5

@Nicholas: I don't want to enter stupid discussions but what I was saying is that PC owners are not the only ones who want to play Guild War 2. And yes, if the game was available on ps3 and xbox360, it would sell more boxes (just logical).

I do want to play this game, but I sure don't want to use a PC.

Edited 1 times. Last edit by Hugo Dubs on 30th August 2012 2:06pm

Posted:8 months ago

#6

Nicholas Pantazis
Senior Editor

@ Hugo Sure, but it's not like porting is free. Money is invested in making that game run on those consoles, and would it make that money back? Would it run well on consoles (it's pretty demanding even on my very powerful gaming PC)? Would it even work on a gamepad (from person experience, no)? Would enough people buy it on consoles if you required them to own a Keyboard & Mouse peripheral? There are a lot of questions that you don't seem to have considered at all. It's never as simple as "just publish every game on every platform and you'll make more money."

Posted:8 months ago

#7

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