WoW player's guide to GW: Business models

There are several different pricing plans for each game, depending on how much you're willing to spend up front, but with Guild Wars, once you buy the chapters, you're done paying for anything else. If you do a head-to-head comparison of one year with WoW including the actual cost of the boxes and the expansion (not counting Lich King yet), you'll spend around $165. This is for the discounted subscription fee of $12.99 USD for 12 months and the current cost of the Warcraft Battlechest which includes Burning Crusade. If you wanted to get the entire Guild Wars experience, you would pay around $110 with no other recurring costs ever. This includes all three chapters of the game plus the Bonus Mission Pack.

In closing, it's obvious that these two games are very different, each catering to a different crowd. Guild Wars was originally developed to be an alternative to World of Warcraft, for those gamers who may not have the time to invest in many of the aspects of WoW that make it such an immense game. Yet, for a game with no monthly fee, Guild Wars is an incredible value for those looking to try something other than the most popular game on the block.