Spicing up short news
Guild Wars 2 will be released on August 28th.
Actually that is all there is to say about that, but for most bloggers that half a line appears to be too short. Thus I found various interesting additions to the news:
MMO Melting Pot: "Servers actually playable and loggable into: Sept 7th"
Killed in a Smiling Accident: "we now know for certain that September 28th is the date when huge sections of the MMO community will be whining that they’re bored and are desperate to know the release dates for Firefall and Wildstar!"
Various: "Now might be a good time to go pre-order the title."
I would like to publicly lodge an objection against the latter. As I mentioned in my hype-cycle post, game companies have become better at exploiting the hype cycle for financial gain. Which means that if you pre-order Guild Wars 2 now, you pay up to 50% more than if you go to a shop on release day and buy it there. I would advise anybody to take a good hard look at the pre-order advantages and decide for himself whether they are worth 20 bucks or so.
To quote Keen: "I logged in to Dark Age of Camelot for the first time after making an impulse buy based on Graev’s insistence. He said to me, “This game launched today, let’s go buy it. It has castles and knights’n stuff.” I knew absolutely nothing about DAOC, and I was rewarded for my ignorance." Paying for beta access can actually result in you paying more and then having less fun on release, because the sense of discovery and wonder is long gone. Instead of having fun you risk rushing to the level cap from the earliest possible "early access" moment. You take the full negative effect of the remaining bugs in beta, the server problems until "Sept 7th", and risk being burned out by "Sept 28th".
Me, I'll pick up Guild Wars 2 on my way back from work on August 28th, with a good likelihood of not getting around to much more than installing the game before the weekend. If game companies insist on digital download prices designed not to hurt their retail partners, they shouldn't be surprised if I'd rather buy my games from retail for less, and make the game company earn a lot less money from me as a customer.
Actually that is all there is to say about that, but for most bloggers that half a line appears to be too short. Thus I found various interesting additions to the news:
MMO Melting Pot: "Servers actually playable and loggable into: Sept 7th"
Killed in a Smiling Accident: "we now know for certain that September 28th is the date when huge sections of the MMO community will be whining that they’re bored and are desperate to know the release dates for Firefall and Wildstar!"
Various: "Now might be a good time to go pre-order the title."
I would like to publicly lodge an objection against the latter. As I mentioned in my hype-cycle post, game companies have become better at exploiting the hype cycle for financial gain. Which means that if you pre-order Guild Wars 2 now, you pay up to 50% more than if you go to a shop on release day and buy it there. I would advise anybody to take a good hard look at the pre-order advantages and decide for himself whether they are worth 20 bucks or so.
To quote Keen: "I logged in to Dark Age of Camelot for the first time after making an impulse buy based on Graev’s insistence. He said to me, “This game launched today, let’s go buy it. It has castles and knights’n stuff.” I knew absolutely nothing about DAOC, and I was rewarded for my ignorance." Paying for beta access can actually result in you paying more and then having less fun on release, because the sense of discovery and wonder is long gone. Instead of having fun you risk rushing to the level cap from the earliest possible "early access" moment. You take the full negative effect of the remaining bugs in beta, the server problems until "Sept 7th", and risk being burned out by "Sept 28th".
Me, I'll pick up Guild Wars 2 on my way back from work on August 28th, with a good likelihood of not getting around to much more than installing the game before the weekend. If game companies insist on digital download prices designed not to hurt their retail partners, they shouldn't be surprised if I'd rather buy my games from retail for less, and make the game company earn a lot less money from me as a customer.
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