How did the release go on Steam? We looked at the release of Guild Wars 2 on Steam at MeinMMO in an article on Saturday, 04/27. We saw:

• Guild Wars 2 got good reviews on Steam: especially long-time fans praised Guild Wars 2 and helped it get 85% positive reviews. Also from MeinMMO’s point of view, the base game of Guild Wars 2 is one of the best Free2Play MMORPGs ever.
• But player numbers were rather lukewarm: new players starting out found themselves intimidated by max-level players already in Guild Wars 2. For experienced players, there was little reason to start over on Steam.
• On Twitch, the Twitch Drops caused a short-term jump, but it quickly subsided.

Guild Wars 2 is doing incredibly well – Steam is just a bonus

This is what the head of the game says now: However, as a report from a Polish MMORPG site reveals, this Steam release image is deceptive. Guild Wars 2’s game director, Joshua “Grouch” Davis, gushes that Guild Wars 2 is doing better right now than it was at the launch of the expansion, End of Dragons, on February 28, 2022 (via mmorpg.pl):

The game is already doing incredibly well, Steam is just the cherry on top of the cake. In the weeks leading up to the Steam launch, more players played Guild Wars 2 than at the launch of End of Dragons. The game was already evolving before the Steam launch. Steam is just a bonus now.

How’s the Steam launch going from the boss’ perspective?

Game Director Davis says it’s too early to talk about the success of the Steam launch. Because here, he says, it’s important to see how many players stick with it and play consistently: The so-called “retention” rate.

This rate is measured after one day, 7, 14 and 28 days. The “14 days” number is especially important: How many players who start with Guild Wars 2 still log in after 2 weeks?

It is still too early to evaluate this.

However, “significant improvements” in retention were noticed before the Steam launch. Guild Wars 2 is apparently currently succeeding in retaining players who look into Guild Wars 2 to the MMORPG.

Guild Wars 2 has the highest relevance in 5 years

Is there any way to track these statements? Yes, the data does bear Davis out. If we look at worldwide Google interest in Guild Wars 2, we see that in the current year, interest was highest (100%) in the week when the End of Dragons expansion was released.

The Steam launch, although it looked “relatively weak”, has now brought interest back to a similarly high level (91% of the peak).

So the Steam launch has significantly increased the relevance of Guild Wars 2 again. This is especially important for ArenaNet, because they have been having trouble setting such “attention peaks” for years.

The two spikes in interest in Guild Wars 2 in 2022 are the highest since 2017. It’s difficult for Guild Wars 2 to set such attention spikes because with the Living World, they tell the story like a TV series that keeps progressing.

It’s obviously hard for players to get into an ongoing – Season if they missed the beginning.