IGNPC: No subscription fee? How realistic is that? Online games have usually required the continuous revenue stream offered by subscription. How will Guild Wars function without this income?

Guild Wars Team: We think that subscription fees limit the number of people who will play a game. In this country, persistent world games have historically appealed only to the most hard-core gamers, partly because they require players to make a huge time investment to be competitive, but also partly because casual gamers are reluctant to sign up for a recurring monthly fee. Conversely, we designed Guild Wars from the ground up to appeal to a broad audience, and that is reflected both in the design of the game and in the way we price it. By eliminating the monthly fee, we'll make significantly less money per player than other online games, but we think we'll more than make up for it by attracting a lot more players.

People have asked us how we'll generate an ongoing revenue stream to enable us to keep supporting and evolving the game. The answer is simple: we'll periodically release expansion sets just like other online games do. When an expansion is released, if you're really enjoying the game and want to experience a bunch of new content, we hope you'll buy it. But you can still keep playing for free whether you buy the expansion or not.

Some fans seem so surprised by our announcement that we're eliminating the monthly fee that they think we must have something up our sleeves. We've heard people theorize that we're going to charge a hundred dollars for the base game, or that we're incorporating advertising into the game, or that it's not really a persistent game or won't really run on our servers. None of that is true. Guild Wars is a persistent online RPG, which will run on our servers and which we'll continuously evolve. We'll pay for all the server and bandwidth costs, and we'll do it all without the monthly fee.

People also want to know why we limited our pricing announcement to North America. There are two reasons for this. First, we can't make announcements for areas where we haven't finalized our distribution partners yet. Second, we want to be sensitive to local preferences and price things in a way that will be as attractive as possible to players in other parts of the world. For example, in Korea and certain other Asian countries, there are game rooms on just about every city block where you can walk in and play any game you want for the equivalent of about a dollar an hour, without ever having to buy the game. That's a fantastic deal for the gamers, and something we want to support. So we will leverage NCSoft's existing infrastructure in these countries to provide people with the pricing model they're most comfortable with.