Mike O'Brien: Guild Wars Gold tends to attract a very diverse audience of people who play the game in different ways and for different reasons, so that's not an easy question to answer. In general, younger players are more likely to identify themselves as hardcore gamers, whereas older players are more likely to be casual gamers. There is a strong female contingent across all age groups, but the majority of players are male. And since Guild Wars Gold has no monthly fee, players keep coming back to it. Even after they stop playing daily or weekly, they still come back to check out holidays and other special events.

IGNPC: Four years ago, making an online game that had no subscription fee seemed like a big risk. Today, it seems that free-to-play seems to be the wave of the future. Yet many free-to-play games also rely on optional microtransactions. Do you think it's possible that Guild Wars Gold will follow suit eventually?

Mike O'Brien: Well, we've been offering optional add-on content like additional character slots, mission packs, and unlock packs since long before microtransactions were all the rage. We view it as putting our money where our mouth is. Instead of forcing players to pay a certain amount every month like subscription games do, we offer players new content and upgrades that we think are compelling, and then the choice to buy or not to buy is entirely up to the player. That was an important part of Guild Wars Gold and it will remain an important part of Guild Wars. But I think that's not really what you're asking.

Today what you generally see in the MMO space is two camps: big games with high production values and high system requirements which charge monthly fees, and small games that are developed inexpensively, have low system requirements, and are free-to-play. Guild Wars Gold fits into neither of those camps. Guild Wars is a big game with high production values, but with modest system requirements and no monthly fees.

It's been four years since we pioneered this business model, and I thought we'd see more competition by now, but we haven't. Perhaps that's because it's a hard space in which to compete. If a game can't reach a broad enough audience, then it can't sustain itself without monthly fees. And if a game doesn't have high enough production values, then it has to be free-to-play because players won't pay for it. Whatever the reason, I think Guild Wars Gold occupies a unique space in the industry and has a uniquely compelling value proposition for players, and that's a great place for us to be.