Eleven years and five months ago, I attended the grand reveal event for Guild Wars 2’s first expansion, Coeur d'épines, at PAX South in San Antonio. The expansion started ten years and eight months ago.

This corresponds to a period of nine months from the announcement (which coincided with the last major content update before the expansion) and the expansion’s launch. And I’m telling you, those were those nine months brutally.

This is not an attempt to rehash the issues ArenaNet had with completing the expansion, which was missing several key elements when it released in October 2015, but rather the community’s reaction to the long gap. Then there was another nine months between the expansion’s release and the next major content update, which came out in July 2016.

It wasn’t a good time in the community, especially for a game that once boasted updates every two weeks. Even if the updates had occurred on a more normal schedule, say every three to six months, a nine-month gap would have tested the patience of even the most ardent fan. Two of them in a row were unbearable.

And yet… in the current time frame, about six and a half months passed between the release of the last expansion (Octobre 28, 2025) and the latest story chapter (Peut 12, 2026) without a hint of dissatisfaction, at least as far as I can tell.

I’m thinking about all of this now because it occurs to me that I think those days of 2015-2016 were the last time I really cared about how long a game took for a major update. These days it doesn’t bother me as much, especially because I have so many other ways to spend the time.

Options galore

Je sais 2015-2016 wasn’t that long ago (only three or four years, droite?), but it was a very different era, especially considering how far gaming has come since then. While there haven’t been many MMORPGs released since then – which I wrote about a few months ago – there have been plenty of other games released since then that suck just as much as MMOs.

At the top are games like Fortnite and Overwatch as well as all their offshoots and clones of battle royale or hero shooters. Add to that the proliferation of survival games, autobattlers, the continued presence of MOBAs and old favorites like CS:GO, and the flood of single-player games or even streaming services to capture our attention, and suddenly it doesn’t seem like such a big deal that your favorite online game goes months between updates.

At least that’s how it is for me. The game I followed the most during this period was Overwatch, which had a fairly long pause in content updates before Overwatch 2. That annoyed me a little, but I just shrugged it off and mostly played other stuff for a while.

Maybe it’s because I’m maturing (unlikely!) and don’t feel like going through the trouble of criticizing developers, or maybe it’s because I just don’t need that single game to occupy my brain anymore. If a game fails to hold my attention, I have no problem moving on to another entertainment product and returning to my old favorite product when the time comes.

While it’s not technically an online game (although it does offer multiplayer), I’m in the same situation right now with Crusader Kings 3, a game I’ve played for almost 1,700 heures. The game’s last major update came in October, and last month’s video shedding light on the future suggested that the next DLC wouldn’t arrive until September of this year. There was a major “maintenance” update this month, but there’s still almost a full year between major content releases.

And I’m okay with that.

Honnêtement, this game desperately needed a “maintenance pass,” and I’m glad it’s getting one, even if it comes at the expense of new content. These days it seems like more games are able to have longer periods like this, and I think both their players and their company heads are showing a little more patience.

Taking the time to do it right

Like any product, games need to make money. And the surest way to make more money is to publish new content. We hear all the time in financial reports about how “expansion X for our game Y increased our revenue to $11 million in the third quarter,” or some variation thereof. This is no less true for private games, where there are no shareholders to answer to.

Donc, game developers are forced to regularly release new content to keep the flow of players – and their money – going. A prolonged period of no content makes things extremely difficult – both for the developer’s bank accounts and for the poor community managers who have to deal with an increasingly dissatisfied player base.

At least that’s how it used to be. While most online games these days have a pretty solid release schedule, even missing a beat or two isn’t the death knell it once was.

Whenever a merger or acquisition occurs, in the press release announcing it, we will include, entre autres, a hint of, “Being part of BigCompany gives us the flexibility to innovate and provides us with the resources we need to sustain our business in the years to come.”

It’s a bit of a cliché these days, but I think there’s a little bit of truth in it. I think most developers and the people who own them have become more realistic about their chances of producing the next World of Warcraft, League of Legends or Fortnite. Bien sûr, they still want to be big and make money, but the last decade and more have shown most of them that such success is erratic and unpredictable, no matter how smart you are (or think you are).

And existing games are allowed to have downtime without failing completely. Bien sûr, mass layoffs still happen occasionally (or not so occasionally), but that’s better than total extinction.

The example I gave of Guild Wars 2 is a great analogy. Depuis 2013 à 2017, average revenue was 23.4 billion Korean won per quarter. This spanned the period from four months post-release through two expansion releases.

Over the next four years, 2018 à 2021, there were only free (albeit regular) updates and no full expansions, and that number dropped to 17.1 billion. In the middle of this sad era, layoffs occurred at ArenaNet in February 2019.

Depuis lors, the company has moved to a more frequent pace of expansion (as I understand it was mandated by NCSoft) and sales have recovered significantly. But how much worse would it have been without NCSoft’s often-lamented ownership?

This is a version of what I described in my personal life, how I can deal with larger gaps in content because I can spend my free time doing a lot of other things. In the same way, companies that have a wide range of developers, like NCSoft, Microsoft or the biggest elephant in the room, Tencent, can afford to give developers a little more time to get things right.

It’s not a perfect analogy because there will always be impatient players or companies that want new things (or more money). Maintenantand we should still be wary if one or more companies control too much market share, but we seem to recognize the benefits of such a system such as they are. If that’s the little good we can get out of all the mergers and acquisitions (and the layoffs that often accompany them), then we might as well join in.