The responsible ones from ArenaNet held a livestream shortly after the announcement of Guild Wars 3 to talk about the future of Tyria. They dropped some exciting info nuggets.
What about the player numbers? In this week’s “Guild Wars Franchise Update Livestream,” Game Director Josh Davis and ArenaNet CEO Colin Johanson explained, among other things, that the announcement of Guild Wars 3 had an immediately positive effect on the player numbers of the predecessor.
Specifically, the number of daily active users in Guild Wars 2 has increased by about 40 percent since the Summer Game Fest. Last Saturday was probably the best day since the Steam launch of Guild Wars 2 in 2022 to attract new players to the servers. The number of returning players (those who took a break of more than a year) is impressive as well.
The previous record was during the launch of the expansion Visions of Eternity and has now been doubled. Many players are likely using ArenaNet’s own launcher. While the number of active users on Steam has increased, it did not quite reach the all-time high from 2025 (9,337 on June 1 versus 10,875 seven months ago – source: steamdb.info).
Guild Wars 2 on Mobile and Consoles? ArenaNet provides a clear answer
What else do the developers reveal? Here are some more details from the stream. If you want to catch the entire show, you can do so on Twitch. However, there were some audio issues. A fixed version of the stream has been uploaded by AchillesMele on his YouTube channel.
- Guild Wars 2 will never be released for mobile devices (like the soon part 1) or consoles (like part 3).
- The topic of consoles was considered in the past for Guild Wars 2, but it quickly became clear that the entire technology of the game would have to be changed.
- This is also due to the fact that parts of the code from Guild Wars 2 still originate from the first Guild Wars.
- Guild Wars 3, on the other hand, is being developed with a focus on releasing on PC AND consoles, so the technology here is supposed to be optimized for both platforms.
- There is a team for Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, and Guild Wars 3, operating independently and separately. For example, the GW3 team does not borrow developers from the other teams.
- Despite this clear separation, there is currently an 18-month break in the annual expansions for Guild Wars 2. The team intends to use this time to bring the old content of the game up to date and remove long-standing issues. Afterward, the annual expansions are set to make a comeback.
- Like the two predecessors, Guild Wars 3 will also address current pain points of the genre that the MMORPG community suffers from. Through the focus on solving these pain points, Guild Wars 3 will significantly differ from the other two games. The goal is to attract completely new players to the MMO genre.
By the way, we have sent some questions to ArenaNet and hope that the answers will arrive here in the foreseeable future. As soon as they are here, we will pass them on to you in the form of an article. Are you looking forward to the future of Guild Wars? Let us know in the comments! One good piece of news is already here: Guild Wars 3 relies on a strength of the predecessors, your wallets will celebrate it
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