Many live service games are just an MMO subscription “hidden inside of a neat ‘optional’ package”, argue Guild Wars 3 devs in a post about the new game’s monetisation

Guild Wars 3 developers ArenaNet have published a Hot Take of sorts about the MMORPG genre, while explaining in broad strokes how their forthcoming “modern evolution” will differ from Guild Wars 1, released in 2005, and Guild Wars 2, released in 2012.

As they note, MMOs and gaming at large have changed enormously over the course of the series. Entire business models, storage formats, and subsets of bikini armour have come and gone. In particular, the developers offer some thoughts about how the MMO genre at large has bled into the concept of live service, making the case that a lot of notionally “optional” live service game monetisation consists of talking around the fact that you’re effectively demanding a subscription.

Like its predecessors, Guild Wars 3 will be a pay-upfront, no-subs affair – a bid to “put players in control” of their time, the devs comment, rather than incentivising people to log in each day to get their money’s worth. “But just saying there won’t be a subscription fee isn’t enough anymore,” studio head Colin Johanson cautions. “We’ve been looking carefully at the newest round of modern MMOs and the broad array of live-service games (that often look suspiciously like MMOs) and seeing how subscription-like systems have evolved.  

“In many newer games, the subscription hasn’t disappeared; it has been reshaped,” he continues. “Paid battle passes, paid recurring seasonal tracks, and similar paid systems often function as a new kind of ongoing fee. That model works for some games, but it’s not aligned with how we think about player freedom in a Guild Wars game. It’s a form of subscription fee, hidden inside of a neat ‘optional’ package that obfuscates the subscription from the player.”

There won’t be any battle passes in Guild Wars 3. There will be paid expansions, paid cosmetics, paid account services, and paid “time-saving convenience items”. A less generous interpretation of Johanson’s post would be that some of these things are manifestations of the “hidden” subscription mentality he’s knocking. If the game is designed to feel deliberately laborious without shortcut items, they effectively become a mandatory recurring purchase.

I’m not especially familiar with how well the Guild Wars series has handled in-game monetisation, over a couple decades of existence, so I can’t really judge how much Arenanet deserve the benefit of the doubt, here. In general, I’m interested in/worried about how companies minimise effective cost. There’s been plenty of talk recently about GTA 6 normalising a $100 price tag, for example, which overlooks that a lot of big publishers already sell games at that threshold in the form of special editions.

Johanson also stresses the importance of GW3 supporting short bursts of play, and not feeling like a “second job”, which reflects an awareness that there’s a lot of competition for people’s time. Then comes a spongey, but not entirely insubstantial account of how the new game will differ from its predecessors.

In brief: Guild Wars (latterly reborn as Guild Wars Reforged) was “a game about a small team: a player and their assembled team of henchmen or hero NPCs or other players they want to bring along with them, overcoming challenges in a predominantly instanced game.” Guild Wars 2 was about “giant world boss battles, map-wide meta-events, and PvP on a massive scale”. And Guild Wars 3?

“While it fits the definition of an MMORPG significantly more than Guild Wars Reforged does, it doesn’t try to replicate the large-scale gameplay pillars that so uniquely define Guild Wars 2,” Johanson explains. “This ensures that all three of our games can coexist as different experiences on different timelines, telling different stories about the world of Tyria.”

If you’d like to know more about the narrative aspect, Johanson has spoken elsewhere about the choice of timeframe. The game is set 1200 years before the events of the original MMO, and explores the sudden departure of the realm’s gods. If that prospect makes you feel ancient, just wait till you read Craig Pearson’s (RPS in peace) post from 2012 about Guild Wars 2’s microtransactions, in which he tentatively advances the thought that “sometime in the last five or so years, the notion that a game is something you keep on paying for after you’ve bought it took hold”.

Ah Craig, please come back and save us from our present live service hell. Come to think of it, some of the Arenanet language in that post is exactly the same as this week’s GW3 bulletin.