Is it Fun? Colin Johanson on How ArenaNet Measures Success

To begin this blog post, let me pose a question: How do you measure the success of an MMO? Historically, it’s been easy to point to success with traditional MMOs: subscription numbers were the ultimate means a company used to measure how well a game was doing, and customers typically looked at those same numbers as well to gauge the success of the game. The number of concurrent users—how many players are online at a given time—was also important, but that number was usually hidden from users.