Sales Q3 2023
GW2 sales appear to be almost unaffected by the SotO release (2023-08-22) . Not looking good.
Sales Q3 2022 for comparison
EoD release (2022-02-28) was in Q1 2022 and sales didn't significantly increase before Q2 2022. Similar to PoF (2017-09-22) where it also took until the next quarter (Q4 2017) for sales to really pick up (almost 35K million). So maybe there is hope, i. e. how many people did you tell that they should buy SotO after you have played it?
Source: https://kr.ncsoft.com/en/ir/irArchive/earningsRelease.do
Compared to pre-HoT numbers: https://i.imgur.com/Vgd7ejp.png
It's sad to see GW2 being barely able to scratch even the pre-HoT numbers of twelve month of content drought. Never mind the pre-HoT numbers during active content deployment. Took them almost ten years after their bait-and-switch.
Switching from big social open world bosses to strict coordinated instanced content. Drastic spike in difficulty in favour of a shift away from chill casual content. General WoWification like trinity and ~~quests~~ quest-like achievement-structure. Didn't go over well with the playerbase, and took them almost ten years to barely recover from it, if one is desperate enough to use the drought numbers as a bar instead of the pre-drought ones.
With the worst being task collections which have to be completed in order, e. g. Frode's Journal which even forces you to do/repeat the 3 SotO metas in a specific order or it doesn't count,
W T F !