Guild Wars 2 sales tail better than forecast, population "very healthy"

Guild Wars 2 isn't going anywhere anytime soon, according to Arenanet - its ongoing sales are higher than anticipated, and its player base is strong and steady.

NCSoft's financials over the past few quarters have shown a decline in Guild Wars 2 sales, but director Colin Johanson told Eurogamer that there's no reason to be gloomy.

"If you look at any game ever made, a year after release, sales are always dropping - that's just very normal. We're also very happy with the rate the sales have been dropping down. It's actually dropped much less than we would have forecasted," he said.

"Something people forget about a lot is that we're already the fastest-selling MMO in history, so even if sales are declining a little bit, that's on the fastest selling MMO in history. We don't really have a problem with that.

"Sales-wise we're just following what any game would naturally follow."

Johanson also said that Guild Wars 2 is yet to launch in several markets, including China, Korea, Russia, Southeast Asia and Brazil - "many of the world's biggest PC gaming hotbeds".

"We're extremely pumped about adding to each of these regions - we think that that sales number is going to take off again, and we're going to see a resurgence in territories we are out in as more and more players from other parts of the world get invested," he said.

"And also as some of the really big projects we're working on in the background come to fruition, we're going to see a spike again in users."

Population-wise, Guild Wars 2 is "doing great", he added, and ArenaNet is "very happy" with the state of things.

"Six months ago to now, it's a very steady, very very healthy population," he said.

Population was given a "through the roof" boost by the world versus world events.

"That was maybe the biggest thing we did in the second-half of the year to affect player population. When that league was going on, when the world-versus-world season was going on, WVW was just packed," the director said.

In fact, ArenaNet is adding extra capacity to cope with the demand, as players had to queue for the server versus server action.