If there’s one way to ensure GW2 is Dead on Arrival when it hits Steam, it’s the performance

Basically, a lot of people like Steam because it's easy. You can browse easily, download and install easily, and usually you can start playing a game in a few clicks.

Because it's so easy, someone who downloads the game and finds that it runs very poorly will likely quickly uninstall and move on to something else, maybe even leaving a bad review.

I know I'm not the only one with a decent rig which struggles to get a consistent frame rate, even with all settings on the lowest settings (it often seems like there's no difference in performance when you lower the settings though).

DX12pxy is great, and does help for a lot of people (works ok for me, I'd say maybe 5/10% increase in performance, my gf gets more like 50/75% increase, so that's great), but a majority of the people who would play through Steam would likely not know about this, or consider it too much effort when the game 'should just work'.

Also, I know there's been some mention of the Living World model as another potential sticking point, and while I do think that needs to be looked at (at least make it super obvious what it is and how to get it on the Steam page), I think a far more immediately impactful one is the game's performance.

I might just be projecting my own frustrations with the game's poor performance here, but I'm sure you'll let me know. Game is genuinely difficult to play sometimes.

I just worry the Steam reviews will all be 'Overwhelmingly Negative', and that's not what I want for GW2, it's such a dang great game, and I'd love to see its population swell just before its biggest release in years; that would mean more money for ANET to hopefully make another expansion after this one. It would also be awesome to see it finally get some real recognition for how great it is.

EDIT: I've seen some talk that about my pc just not being up to GW2, and while it reaches recommend specs, I'm sure it would run nicer if I had a better CPU. hHowever I made this post because my pc is very comparable to 'average steam user's PC's, only being slightly better in the GPU department. If the average steam user's pc runs the game like this they won't play it – there's other options that don't give them a headache.