Virtual Worlds #10: Xbox 360 Won’t Enter Guild Wars

The tenth installment of Yahoo! Games’ Virtual Worlds feature takes a closer look at ArenaNet’s decision not to port Guild Wars over to the Xbox 360. A few reasons why:

Say Guild Wars came out on the Xbox 360, and proved somewhere near as big a hit as it did on the PC. Let’s assume, too, that Microsoft makes good on its promise that Xbox Live Silver members — who don’t pay MS any kind of fee for the service — would be able to play Guild Wars without upgrading to the fee-paying Gold level. Here’s the problem with that situation: assuming Guild Wars stays free, who’s paying for the bandwidth through Microsoft’s servers?

Even if we take a pay-to-play MMO, like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars’ sister product City of Heroes, there’s still no clear answer to that question. Bandwidth isn’t free, and with all those 1GB+ demos being pulled down from the Live servers, MS must be on pretty friendly terms with its ISP sales reps already. Why compound the problem if you don’t stand to gain much from it? Even with a revenue-sharing agreement, is it really likely to make Microsoft (as opposed to the publisher of this hypothetical game) enough money to bother with? If the game’s a success, it’ll be a significant resource drain. If it isn’t, then… well, why bother?