Demonstrating my typical nose for all things fashionable in MMO, I've not got Guild Wars yet. I live in the UK, and like usual, my local game shop, (imaginatively named 'Game'), is proudly sporting 'Reserve Your Copy Now!' fake boxes for it; yet again we, the second-class citizens of Elbonia must wait until the USAF can air-drop PC Gaming Relief Parcels on our ravaged war-torn land. That said, if I was really that frenetic about the game, I'd have probably ordered direct from the US via Amazon or something by now.

It does sort of strike me as an impulse-buy though, a sort of 'Hell, it's only £25, and no monthly fee, I'll give it a go' that I'll end up buying if I see it in a shop. It's that whole monthly fee thing that's confusing me though.

These kinds of numbers are typically shrouded in secrecy, but one would imagine that server-farm bandwidth costs for a game as popular as Guild Wars can't be cheap. There would be money for box sales, certainly, but much of that money gets eaten up by the phyiscal production of CD and box, one reason many smaller MMOs are keen to move to Digital Download instead. Then there's the cost of X-many developers working full-time (and crunch-time) for two or more years. This all has to be paid for somehow, and with no monthly fee, it's hard to see how.

With no monthly fee and no advertising revenue, I'm suprised that Guild Wars can exist at all, but now they're adding free content patches?

Kill Ten Rats: New Content For Free?

Good greif. I was figuring they'd just release it, shovel the money into the back of the truck and then let it run itself into the ground while they race for the state line, but clearly this isn't the case. So I can offer only three possible reasons to explain this bizzarre creation of Money From Nothing:

  • Guild Wars installs massive amounts of spyware, and even now, your PC is part of a huge distributed network of enslaved processing. The ultimate purpose of this mega-net is unknown, but probably involves a hollowed out volcano somewhere. And frikin' lasers.
  • ArenaNet is being run by some mysterious philanthropist billionaire recluse type who spends his days providing cheap, clean, renewable fun for gamers, and his nights stalking the rooftops, fighting Crime.
  • Guild Wars exists as a massive loss-leader for 'Project Omega', an as yet unidentified future game which will be irresistable, and expensive. (This is my favourite theory.)

I'm not sure which is more scary. Tin Foil Hats at dawn!

EDIT: The Red Cross Parcels arrived today, and Guild Wars is on the shelves for £30 a go. I almost got one, but then realised that I already have more than enough MMOs on the go at the moment, so decided to wait until I'm bored of one of my current crop, which probably won't take long.