Our goal is to protect our current community but also to make it as easy as possible for you to introduce the game to your friends, to recruit new players into your guilds, to challenge new players to Player vs. Getting the Details RightĪ game like Guild Wars 2 lives and dies by its community. We’re making the core game experience free because we’re confident that anyone who loves Guild Wars 2 will buy Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns. Guild Wars 2 remains the same game it always has been. If anyone can play Guild Wars 2 for free now, does that mean we’re switching business models to free-to-play? Are we going to be one of those games that aggressively monetizes free players through microtransactions? Absolutely not. For anyone who’s been curious about Guild Wars 2, now you can just go to, download the game, and start playing. And today we’ll go a step further: we’re making the core game free for everyone. To accomplish that, we’ve already included the core game as a free bundle for anyone who buys Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns. So let’s be clear that when we say Guild Wars 2 is buy-to-play, we’re only asking you to buy one thing: the current release, Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns. As we get ready to ship our first expansion for Guild Wars 2, we want to ensure that we keep the business model friendly and simple. It doesn’t seem right, and we want to do better. When you’re coming in as a new player to a game that has a bunch of expansions, what exactly should you buy in order to play with your friends? The base game and also every single expansion? We’ve seen examples in the industry where that kind of thing has gotten out of control. And we’ve delivered more than 40 major content releases, with world-changing events, Living World episodes, and feature packs, all free of charge.Įxpansions are the one place where the buy-to-play model gets a little tricky. Since launching three years ago-almost to the day, today-we’ve sold more than 5 million copies of the game. This business model has been fantastic for Guild Wars 2 and our fans. It’s good for gamers and good for developers. We’ve been championing this as a great business model for MMOs since launching the first Guild Wars® a decade ago.

Guild Wars 2 has the simplest of business models: buy the game and play it as long as you want with no monthly fees. With Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™ launching soon, there’s no better time to introduce the game to your friends. Today we’re happy to announce that the Guild Wars 2 core game is available for everyone to play for free.

Guild wars 2 free or not