Not to take anything away from Guildwars(5 million is an impressive number), but to put it on the same playing field as WOW is not a true painting of the picture. I bought the original Guildwars, and 2 of the expansions, however I do not actively play the game any longer and have not logged in for months. What would be a more faithful comparison for purposes of "subscriptions"(guildwars doesn't charge monthly) would be account log ins within a given time frame from both games. My understanding is that WOW has around 9 million active accounts(i.e. paying subscriptions) which from a business perspective is all that matters.

But for actual bragging rights of which game fields the most log ins in a given month, we would need both companies to track and release that information. Until then, purely from anecdoctal evidence WOW is still leagues ahead of Guild Wars from a client retention standpoint.

Eventually, games like Guild Wars (free online play) should take over from the other MMORPG games that charge for online time. There is a whole subset of online gamers who don't have the time to play online every day. Playing online sporadically means an monthly fee is not worth purchasing the product. Guild Wars brings a great game to the hard core gamers and allows the "every once-in-a-while" gamers to participate as well.

NCSoft is notorious for inflating numbers, starting with Lineage. I would guess Guild Wars has had less than a million players. When each player has to buy 4 boxes for each account they own, you are going to sell an assload of boxes.

"To be fair, we have to note that this number does not mean that there are five million Guild Wars gamers in the world. It is simply an indication how many game boxes of the franchise have sold so far."

"The two most popular titles alone attract an audience of 15 million gamers these days."

Contradiction. WoW has 10 million subscribers, GW has sold 5 million boxes. I would also like to note that many GW players purchase multiple games to unlock the extra characters and abilities.

PC games have been using virtual communities for a decade. I would say the evolution has already occurred.

gw: prophecy, faction, nightfall are all campaign
gw: eye of the north is the only expansion.

im telling arenanet that this news w/e the hell it is ... is using wrong info. like i mentioned earlier, guild wars prophecy, factions and nightfall are all campaign, there is only one expansion which is called eye of the north.

do you know what expansion means?

This is a joke. The amount of units that guildwars has sold cannot even come close to the player base that WoW has.

Guildwars is free because noone in their right mind would pay a monthly fee for it. period.

I would play GW if they made it for Mac OS..but until then I'll stick to EQ and WoW

I seem to remember NCSoft saying they had 4 million people playing Lineage2 a couple years back. I think they were counting all of the damn bots! So I wouldn't count the number of game accounts or subscriptions as actual players in some of these games...

GW's numbers are reported for what they are - box sales - and ANet / NCsoft have never claimed otherwise. If you go back through some of the older press releases, though, you can find some statements about numbers of active players on specific weekends.

Re: other NCsoft reporting of numbers ... well, given that NCsoft Korea is a publically listed company and therefore *required* to post quarterly results figures, they can't lie. L1 and L2 are currently running around 1 million active subs each - but both are a long way down on their peak.