Awful news. I have my issues with GW2, but it’s a remarkable game.
They have been working on other games but development was apparently too slow and hadn’t come to fruition yet.
I have a family member that will be beside himself when he gets to his computer next.
Well, that was…terse.
-Tom
Quoting myself because now we got official confirmation:
She’s the dev that was publicly fired, right? So I would take whatever she says with roughly four kilos of salt.
Because her getting fired, along with another over some row with a community member somehow invalidates the fact that they’re laying off people now… exactly how?
Regardless, even the Kotaku article mentions there are multiple projects. My post was from 2015.
I think they must have had NUMEROUS setbacks with whatever they are working on. I don’t even think (as I said in those older posts) they were planning for GW2 expansions, since they came late in the cycle. They were, imo, some kind of backpedaling in order to secure more money and funnel it toward what they were working on, since they probably expected to have it ready much, much sooner.
But with layoffs right now it doesn’t look good. Not much for GW2, but for whatever else. You don’t work on a big mmorpg while wasting resources on multiple other projects. And especially you don’t lay off people when you are just about to finalize a big game.
GW2 wasn’t well supported from my point of view, and so it means they were working on something else. Yet this something else never materialized, and right now it doesn’t look it will…
Lol, even (former) Mythic Mark Jacobs seems to confirm:
Update: In response to our inquiry, ArenaNet issued the following statement:
“We can confirm that due to the cancellation of unannounced projects, ArenaNet will make staff reductions. This is part of a larger organizational restructuring within NCSOFT in the west, but the Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 game services will not be affected, nor is any upcoming game content canceled.”
The studio declined to comment on the number of employees affected by the cuts.
Arenanet taking forever to build a new game doesn’t mean there were setbacks, or at least anything unexpected. Both Guild Wars games had a very long development. Arenanet is just slow.
I think it’s highly unlikely they didn’t intend to do expansions. It’s the same flow as the first game and they surely know themselves enough to know they’re not going to just bust out another game two years later. I’m not sure by what metric you are determining the game “wasn’t well supported”; there were plenty of post release updates and changes. I think they were more hamstrung by a too-simplistic core design and a too-efficient economic model than a lack of effort.
So how does GW2 make money? From players buying stuff in game and from the sales of expansions? I wonder what their break even point is in terms of keeping the servers running and staffing to maintain the game and fix bugs?
It’s not a perfect comparison, but original Guild Wars is (as far as I know) still up and running.
Yes, the in-game shop, selling expansions, and also players purchasing previous living world episodes. I’m sure maintenance mode would be easily covered, but once you put a game in maintenance mode the players realize that and start to leave. So you do need to continue developing content. If you focus on narrative content, that isn’t necessarily super expensive.
On that note, I know a gal (local playwright) who was just hired to write for the game within the last six months. And just checking FB, she seems to have survived the layoffs.
How do you even cancel multiple projects? Can’t do one thing, let’s do ten! You can’t on one side be “slow” while stretching the team across multiple projects.
Anyway, the first expansion for GW2 came out more than three years later, that’s why I think it was unplanned, and it was also TINY compared to the rest of the game.
Then two years later comes the second expansion and it’s bigger than the first.
Now we are almost 7 years after GW2 launch. GW1 had THREE expansions within a couple of years. Then it was abandoned for five years to make GW2.
Both GW1 and 2 were done in about five years, and it was also with a smaller company and while building the technology. It’s absurd that they’ve done so little for GW2 and they still have nothing else to show.
How do you call this if not a setback? If those projects were good they wouldn’t be canceled, they would be released. Again, it makes no sense that you lay off people while trying to launch a big mmorpg. If anything this undermines Arena.net’s future.
I have to agree with you. This is a blow to ANet. They probably had GW3 in the works and that has been cancelled. Maybe they can repurpose some content for that into GW2.
If it wasn’t GW3 is was likely some other similar game in a different setting.
Blizzard was able to repurpose Titan into Overwatch. I wonder if ANet can reuse what they have been working on?
I don’ think GW2 is in a position to improve, it’s way too late.
And I don’t think they canceled whatever big project they have. Only “setbacks”. But the way they handled GW2 makes me doubt of any future title. I think GW2 still runs on a DirectX 9 client while they were promising even DX12. They simply let it “exist” with that weak living story excuse but no serious work was put into it.
GW2 won’t shut down because it’s their only source of income, but they are forced to deliver something else now.
Lots of long-time employees leaving or fired by NCsoft today, but the one that really stood out was Gaile Grey. She was around from the very beginning of Guild Wars one. She was the voice of Guild Wars.
Overall, roughly 25% of Arena.net either took a package or was fired.