Guild Wars 2 Goes Free-To-Play Effective Immediately

Published: August 29, 2015 7:15 PM /

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Guild Wars 2 Logo

If you have been holding out for a chance to play Guild Wars 2, believing the game may go free to play, your wait is over. Effective today, you can play Guild Wars 2 for free.

The Guild Wars 2 team announced the news via Twitter.

Guild Wars 2

On the Guild Wars 2 website, the company explains this is in part a decision made to keep their business model "friendly and simple."

Guild Wars 2 has the simplest of business models: buy the game and play it as long as you want with no monthly fees. We’ve been championing this as a great business model for MMOs since launching the first Guild Wars a decade ago. We continue to believe in buy-to-play. It’s good for gamers and good for developers.

Expansions are the one place where the buy-to-play model gets a little tricky. When you’re coming in as a new player to a game that has a bunch of expansions, what exactly should you buy in order to play with your friends? The base game and also every single expansion? We’ve seen examples in the industry where that kind of thing has gotten out of control. It doesn’t seem right, and we want to do better. As we get ready to ship our first expansion for Guild Wars 2, we want to ensure that we keep the business model friendly and simple. So let’s be clear that when we say Guild Wars 2 is buy-to-play, we’re only asking you to buy one thing: the current release, Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns.

"If anyone can play Guild Wars 2 for free now, does that mean we’re switching business models to free-to-play? Are we going to be one of those games that aggressively monetizes free players through microtransactions? Absolutely not."

Some conditions that come with a free account vs. a standard paid account include fewer bag slots, chat and economy restrictions, and some location restrictions if your level is not high enough.

Guild Wars 2 follows Star Wars: The Old Republic and WildStar in the growing list of MMO's that chose to go free-to-play. TechRaptor took a look at the upcoming expansion for Guild Wars 2 during E3 2015.

How do you feel about this growing trend for MMO's to go free-to-play? Do you like it or do you think micro transactions may sully the experience? And of course, as always when MMO's go free-to-play, to you believe World of Warcraft will do so in the future? Let us know in the comments below!

Have a tip, or want to point out something we missed? Leave a Comment or e-mail us at tips@techraptor.net


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