But the article also questions ArenaNet's statement about their Q1/2022 performance:
The February 2022 launch of End of Dragons helped us land our strongest Q1 performance since the announcement of Heart of Thorns in 2015
-- ArenaNet
At this point, we suspect the real figure being discussed here is something more like “strongest expansion-pack sales in any week during a Q1 since HOT was announced”
-- MassivelyOP
The February 2022 launch of End of Dragons helped us land our strongest Q1 performance since the announcement of Heart of Thorns in 2015
That's hilarious to me. They never recovered from their bait and switch from chill casual open world to hardcore get fucked instanced challenging content up until EoD, and even then only barely. That's eight years! Of course, if you look at expansion box sales and not the numbers inbetween, then the sales spikes allow for an entirely different interpretation of what HoT did to the game.
I hope that ArenaNet understands, why WildStar (also ncsoft) died. I still think that by far the majority of GW2 (or rather MMO in general) players are not hardcore raiders but casual players who very much enjoy a chill open world experience with some optional challenges thrown in for good measure.
It's totally worth it. The amount of content can actually be a little overwhelming though. I feel like I have so much stuff I can do, but too little time 😅.
It's free to play, so boot it up and give it a try!
The game is clearly not dead, but people are a bit wary about how ArenaNet's new content release plan, i. e. smaller Expansions but more frequent, will play out.
I assume you still have an account. If not, you can play the Core Game (everything apart from Expansions and Living World content) on a F2P account and see for yourself.
Definetly worth to revisit it. You have too much content even with the base game and the expansions are worth the money.
Especially since you pay only once and have no subscription. Just take your time, explore and enjoy the story. Best MMO that values your time and money IMO.