The big gaming companies have released their quarterly figures for the fourth quarter of 2022 and thus for the entire last year. Positive developments are especially evident in WoW and Guild Wars 2. But a lot has also happened with other MMORPGs this week. We look back at the most important news of the week.
The highlights of the week:
- Guild Wars 2 achieved a revenue of 93 billion won (about 69 million euros) this year. This is the strongest value since 2015, the year the first of the three previous expansions was released (via NCSoft). Furthermore, the MMORPG has tripled its player count.
- Blizzard is likely pleased as well, since WoW Dragonflight retains more players than the last expansions.
- MeinMMO author Kevin Nielsen wrote an article about our FYNG-Love campaign. In it, he describes how the MMORPGs WoW and SWTOR have contributed to both his personal and professional happiness.
The scandal of the week: Twitch streamer Tectone accidentally shared the subject of an email, according to which he received $35,000 for playing Lost Ark as sponsorship. This has been critically discussed and some viewers are now calling for not to support big streamers with donations and subscriptions as they already earn enough.
The discussion of the week: While Dragonflight has been able to retain more players on the one hand, fewer players have returned at the start of Dragonflight. Cortyn has written a special about the current situation:
This week in the podcast: In the podcast MMO News, Alexander Leitsch and Mark Sellner discuss the most important news around MMORPGs again this week. Topics included the raid scandal in Final Fantasy XIV, the anniversary in Lost Ark, and the MMORPG Quinfall, which sounds too good on paper.
You can listen to the episode on Spotify here:
WoW removes feature that no one ever wanted
This is what happened with the big MMORPGs:
- WoW has announced the discontinuation of a feature that players have laughed about for 7 years. Furthermore, there is currently a bug in the auction house that costs Cortyn thousands of gold every day. A curious story is also circulating about a 19-year-old white item that is suddenly worth millions of gold.
- In Final Fantasy XIV, a popular unofficial feature was shut down because two players had a dispute. In addition, the demolition of houses has been suspended due to the earthquake in Turkey and Syria (via FFXIV).
- Lost Ark is celebrating its first birthday in the West. In keeping with this, there is now an achievement for players who logged in on each of the 365 days. Our author Mark Sellner also summarizes how his first year with Lost Ark went: Lost Ark annoyed me after 4 months – 1 year later I love it even more.
- We spoke with Creative Director Rich Lambert about the new ESO expansion and he explained to us what makes the new class so special. Additionally, our author Melli explained in a column why the year 2023 will be great for ESO.
- Guild Wars 2 held an extensive preview livestream for the upcoming balance update (via Twitch). The patch will be released on February 14.
This is what happened with the small MMORPGs:
- New World has released rankings for PvP as well as PvE content.
- EVE Online is testing the implementation of Excel sheets into the game in a beta and making a meme come true.
- ArcheAge Unchained released new “Fresh Start” servers on Thursday (via ArcheAge).
- The Wagadu Chronicles, the Afro-fantasy MMORPG from Germany, is hosting a new test in March. Here you can apply through a Google document.
- Chimeraland, the MMORPG with the crazy character editor, has released a new dinosaur continent and new pets (via MassivelyOP).
- SWTOR has brought the new patch 7.2.1 to the test servers. The big highlight is the new 64-bit client (via SWTOR).
- Gloria Victis celebrated its release on Steam and was able to decuple its player count. The peak was on February 11 with 3,243 players (via SteamDB).
- Throne and Liberty is still planned for the first half of 2023. This was revealed by the developers of NCSoft in their call for the quarterly report. Here you can watch the latest trailer again:
This is what happened with MMORPGs in development:
- Reign of Guilds is an old school MMORPG with a subscription model. It was supposed to release at the end of 2022, now an open playtest has taken place.
These are the MMORPG news of the week at a glance. What was your personal highlight? Did you experience anything interesting this week that you would like to share? Or have we perhaps forgotten something important? Feel free to write it in the comments here at MeinMMO.
You can find the best MMOs and MMORPGs of 2023 in this list: The 15 currently best MMOs and MMORPGs 2023.
