So many folks have reached out to me to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the launch of Guild Wars on April 28, 2005, that it encouraged me to write this little bitty.
I was heartened to see an article about Guild Wars in GameRant, which talked about the server infrastructure of the game, and most notably about its uptime.
The article opines that “something about Guild Wars sets it apart from its competition: it, and subsequently its sequel, have had almost no downtime in over two decades.”
While we did have several outages during my decade-long tenure at ArenaNet, notably one that took twelve hours to recover after a game exploit, overall we had years of reliable service with no downtime, including no timeouts for maintenance or patches. At one point several game services had over two years of uptime, and in the period after I left there have been uptime records three times that!
That reliability is a testament to the skill of the folks on the team who built the game, which was written in C++, a programming language that comes pre-packaged with a plethora of ways to shoot oneself in the foot.
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As I consider the premise of the article, about the promise of the game’s reliability, I believe there’s a promise that stands in greater relief: its player-friendly business model. Guild Wars is a fully server-hosted game like World of Warcraft, and has similarly vast scope, but has never charged a monthly fee, nor followed other online peers by transitioning to free-to-play.
As we were building the original incarnation of the game, we learned that EverQuest (“EQ”) had hosting costs of around a dollar per player, per month. I expect Sony’s costs for EQ have decreased as servers and bandwidth became less expensive over the years, but even 90% lower hosting costs would not have been enough for Guild Wars to be successful.
So in many ways the miracle of Guild Wars was the ability of the development team to create a product that didn’t require expensive hardware costs like servers, bandwidth, power, and cooling, nor expensive people costs for operations and support, while at the same time creating a game that players would love and continue to play.
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So I’d like to thank my developer teammates — artists, designers, programmers, audio engineers, quality assurance, and live ops — for their efforts in building something that set a high water mark for reliability as well as enjoyment, and to my publishing teammates — marketing, public relations, customer support, webdev, legal, and operations — who ensured players could join the affray fighting off the hordes of monsters in Ascalon and beyond.
Thank you.
