There have been a handful of debates in the IRC as to whether Guild Wars could sustain itself on shelf sales of the initial copy and expansion packs with no monthly fees, as obviously development costs and server costs are fairly high these days.
Personally I think that more and more people will emigrate from MMORPGs with monthly fees to psuedo-MMOs like Guild Wars. At the end of the day most people are greatly inconvinienced by those fees, and the more you like the game, you more you end up hurting for it. I'm not saying it's immoral or bad economics, but with a solid alternitive I don't think many would will stick by it.
Guild Wars' MMO content is pretty much Diablo 2 with a
slightly more persistent world manifest in the PvP zones and the dynamic lobbies (ahem, cities). Its servers really can't be that much harder to maintain. And battle.net is still going (and Diablo 2 is one of the best selling PC games of all time
) with no monthly fees.
Sustainability is the key issue, because as expansion packs start selling less, it becomes exponentialy harder to maintain the servers. I imagine at some point they'll officialy shut the game down, but probably with some fantastic closing sequence like a grand tournament with one final winner-- it seems to have been designed that way. And then it's on to their next big product.
Two more cents: I think there will always be a market for true persistant MMORPGs that don't use highly instanced data like Guild Wars does. They have huge downsides, as anyone who has played Everquest, Asheron's Call, etc knows, but there's also a level of community, economics and immersion in them you don't get with instanced content.
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