Sales Q3 2023
GW2 sales appear to be almost unaffected by the SotO release (2023-08-22) . Not looking good.
Sales Q3 2022 for comparison
EoD release (2022-02-28) was in Q1 2022 and sales didn't significantly increase before Q2 2022. Similar to PoF (2017-09-22) where it also took until the next quarter (Q4 2017) for sales to really pick up (almost 35K million). So maybe there is hope, i. e. how many people did you tell that they should buy SotO after you have played it?
Source: https://kr.ncsoft.com/en/ir/irArchive/earningsRelease.do
Hear, hear. I'm pretty sure there are like five OG fans left that actually enjoyed the concept of a casual open world MMO. The most bizarre thing is that Anet actually managed to take off by not competing with WoW and instead pandered to an entirely different consumer bracket.
s i g h
Yep, I'm probably one of those fans. Though I also very much like the team-play aspect that usually comes with (instanced) group content. What I would like are random encounters you'd find in open world (possibly instanced) which would ~~require~~ encourage people to spontaneously group up as a team of max. 5 to beat it.
Similar to Dungeoneering in RuneScape, but with occurances/entrances randomly spread out over the open world, using your current gear scaled to the level of the encounter, difficulty/rewards scaled to the number of people in the group and the overall theme based on the current zone.