NCSoft sales down....

How will this effect Guild Wars, if at all?

http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/tech...0394711780.htm

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/new...hp?story=12673

Looks like Guild Wars is farther from the grave than many of the naysayers think. I think we should be seeing some Chapter 4 info in the next month or so and many more chapters in the future.

Sweet. Thanks.

Is Auto-Assault officially closed now?

Great post, good for guildwars yet maybe not so much for NC. I finally get to be relieved of all the "leavers/complainers" by these stats. Guildwars I expect to only go down in a very long time to come. Let the good times roll'

What also could be hurting NcSoft is this. Depends on how many have been doing this. Could be hundreds of people taking away the profits that NcSoft would otherwise be making. And the players who were using this were also taking away profits from NcSoft.

http://www.plaync.com/us/news/2007/0...i_talks_a.html

And this

http://www.fbi.gov/page2/feb07/iptheft020107.htm

making less profit != dying

Analysts attributed the poor performance to decreasing popularity of online role-playing games, in which NCsoft has been leading the market with its hit Lineage series.



When Prophecies was out I would suggest to others "Yeah man go grab this game it's awesome". In PvE when you would do a quest you would get rewarded by unlocking a skill which to me was the best thing ever .That wasn't the case with later chapters. Now when on-line friends (most of my real life buds don't do computer games) ask me what I am playing I do say GW but I let them know it's not worth purchasing.

How about you let them make up their own minds about wether or not it is worth purchasing? Sure that is your opinion but there are many 10's of thousands that say otherwise. If someone asks me if it is worth buying I say 'Sure but that is my opinion, here is a friend key for you to try it out.'
Never ever make the decisions for other people, unless of course you get paid to do it for a living.

... Although I agree I suppose you are making the claim that GW is not good enough to buy since there is no skill rewards per quest.

It does suck yet at the same time I see the reasoning in the PvP campaign(factions) its quick easy just level buy all the skills you want asap, not have to dive into the campaign to obtain something specific. Yet I fail to see why nightfall did not have the skill quest reward mechanic. Good point could make PvE more interesting, but I think you don't exactly have the reason why sales are down.

Auto Assault was a rubbish game anyhow. I played the beta and was completely unimpressed.

I think it is because you are supposed to use those nifty skillpoints.

Hummmm new Guild Wars in second half of the year - guess that answers some speculation as to when chapter 4 will be out

Not necessarily, it just means simply that they need to do something different in order to show investors that will improve in the future.

You can see this by them writing off AutoAssault as well as coming out with new titles and expanding on their more profitable existing titles.

Good to see that they are holding off a little on the next Guild Wars. Of course I say this in the sense that now they have no excuses for not fixing the existing problems that have persisted in the first couple chapters.

When one of your products, especially when you don't have a large number of products in your line, fails, it makes a huge impact on your profits. All of the developement time, production, distributing, etc. all cost money that they can't recover because the product didn't sell.

Profits are down, they're not gone. If they had lost money, then there may be cause for concern. Besides, GW sales are up by 65%. I don't think they're in as much trouble as people are trying to make out.

It's only one quarter. You never know what the next few quarters will be. Like Kook said, the profits are down and not in the negatives. This quarter and the next will tell whether or not NCSoft is losing money/profit.

Guild Wars sales went up 65%, yet their earnings took an overall hit. What does this mean? This means that even if GW sells great, more people are playing other games. If all those games sell poorly, GW will not be enough on it's own.

Let's look at the bigger picture next time, ok?

(aimed at people who think GW can save a publisher by itself.)

I dont think you are looking at the bigger picture. Ncsoft is only the publisher, ncsoft haveing poor sales doesn not afect Anets revenue since Anet is only working on guild wars which is selling well.

NCsoft loseing money does not equal anet loseing money

the fact is private servers for MMOs are booming... there are literally 100s of them with 1000s of players a day all seeking a place to play because the product they purchased is too expensive to keep otherwise. The ONLY exception to date of this extortion is GuildWars. And because of this it will legitimately last years beyond its predecessors that have subscription fees.

Indeed I am looking at right now a list of about 50 WoW private servers some with the burning crusade addition on it, and guess what? they are packed... Seeing as it was Blizzard that had this Private server option back during the beta but consequently did a bait and switch and removed it at release... I call that a cheap a$$ move on their part... And since I will NEVER touch a subscription server again... This is all there is to play the product I purchased on... indeed the company IPs are blocked from my network because I will only use free servers to play that pitiful excuse of a game...

Anets business model is secure in that they have a good efficient and Fair model in place. If you don't want a chapter don't get it... But you can play what you have purchased forever at face value... As it should be... Indeed if you look at the release schedule for chapters the only thing they could do to make a little more money is distribute via web only for a few chapters with a marginal release in retail only... This would yield a bigger profit for anet in the end... And still maintain the free to play feeling...

I think sometime soon this is how it will end up being... Once they get their store kinks worked out...

There is no need to find or use "FREE Private servers" because shocker GW is free to play!!! so why would anyone go to a lesser content server? The other games WoW, EQ, Linage, FF, EvE, ect... they all have the free to play feature removed and as such do very little to increase their content or player base. so In the end they are doomed to fail to the free servers eventually... No matter what they do legally. for every one they take down 30 will pop up... Just like all other P2P services... The more they tighten their grip, the more systems will slip through their fingers... (Shameless Star Wars Knockoff Quote...)

Gw cannot cost anything to keep active, Gw is selling well fact. Nc the company took a hit on a game that did not do well, Gw will be fine. It is making a profit, 1 game for the company did not. I dont think Gw can save a publisher by itself but it doesnt hurt that it made a profit.

Even if NCsoft go bankrupt, it wont effect Anet in anyway. Why? Because GW is doing good and there's plenty of other investors willing to "donate" money. NCsoft would just sell off Anet to another company to keep itself alive.

Wow, who'd think that CoH&CoV have only made 6% of NCsoft's total sales..

wow...every business makes a little less profit at some time. EVERY BUSINESS.

hand off Anet to someone else?

Oh oh! hand it off to blizz!

I wonder what would happen there///

It looks like NCSoft was right to expand outside their "comfortable" Asian markets. The sales gains in America and especially Europe attest to that and help to cushion any downturns in their home markets.

I wish they'd spend a little more time and money on improving customer support in the U.S., at least. I hope they see it as an investment in future sales. Better training for frontline reps would be helpful, emphasizing the need to resolve problems, not just provide information in the form of boilerplates.

Interesting... maybe we'll see a night elf in GW after all

NCsoft is NOT losing money!!!! They just didn't make as much in 2006 as they did in 2005.

Could someone explain to me how NCSoft going bankrupt doesn't affect ANet? Doesn't NCSoft GIVE ANet money to produce the game?

Every single one of us who's permanently left CoX because of the constant rounds of nerf hard, tone up a bit so that the players think we're listening, nerf hard again, tone things back up a tiny bit more...

Global Defense nerf. ED. The constant screwing with burn. The entire game past 30 if you have no mez protection. I played CoH for almost 2 years, and ED finally killed it for me. Not to mention that they haven't actualy put out a new box for retail in a while. I'd bet that figure was jsut retail boxes sold, though, and doesn't count the 154,000 subscribers (down from 170,000 for the first 3 quarters) who are still paying to feel like half the hero they used to be.

~A disgruntled ex-player

This little debate that came out of this topic is meaningless

Aside from that just how many of the kids here know what their talking about anyway?

NCSoft is a publisher. Their business is to finance game developers and profit from the sales of successful titles. Since they finance multiple titles, their net profit is the sum of all sales from each successful title, minus all the losses from each failing title. If Guild Wars was the only title that NCSoft published and it was profitable, NCSoft would make a net profit. The complexity arises when factoring in the success of each title they produce. GW could actually be a wild success, and if NCSoft was poorly managed-e.g. they financed a whole bunch of crappy developers-, NCSoft could go under because all the other titles were terrible losses. That said, I wouldn't worry about the effect of NCSoft's solvency on Guild Wars. Arena.net likely has a contract guaranteeing a flat rate for the funding of Chapter 4. They won't get paid any less because CoH isn't selling very well. Moreover, the financial reports sound pretty optimistic for the game we love. Assuming GW was profitable in the previous quarter, it's now selling even more. That gives them more leverage to negotiate a better contract in the future. Depending on the contract's term, Arena.net could conceivably make even more money by pitting NCSoft against another publisher. "Hey EA, give us $10M and let us keep 10% of our sales." "Hey NCSoft, they said okay. Are you going to beat that offer?"

So what would happen if NCSoft flopped and GW was still a successful product line? Someone else would negotiate an agreement with Arena.net to continue publishing their games. So long as Arena.net is profitable, some investor will be willing to give them the money they need to publish Chapter X. As the game grows in popularity, their ability to negotiate a better contract actually goes up.

To make a really informed assessment, though, we'd need to know how much profit each company is generating and compare that with prior profits. If profits are up for that title, no publisher is going to cut funding. If profits are down, then they might. Since GW is a big part of NCSoft's sales, though, it's probably pretty safe to say that they'll seek to keep Arena.net as a developer. Heck, they might even cut them a better deal, which would only be goodness for us. What if NCSoft decided to make GW its flagship title instead of Lineage? What if they decided to invest twice the capital, allowing GW to double it's production staff? What if they wanted to go toe-to-toe with WoW for North America dominance of the MMORPG market? >

Realistically, though? It'll probably be business as usual. No company makes a freakish change in business strategy over a single quarter's decline in profits. Banks and other private investors, which underwrite a lot of the investments publishers make, don't like unstable companies. Shareholders like their guaranteed passive profits.

Interesting...

Interesting....





*sorry, couldn't resist* :P

You happen to be an idiot.

!= is a logic symbol which means Does Not Equal.

The previous poster to whom you were replying was saying exactly what you attempted to, but much more elegantly.

Its funny that guild Wars is NCSoft's best (current) seller though... shame they never pushed it more, it could have easily been up there with WoW as it has so many differences it could stand as a seperate purchase

So the initial talk about Chapter 4 coming out in August was more than likely closer to being true, although August is just the 2nd month in the 3rd quarter. It might not even be that early.

http://arena.net/about.php
Anet doesn't have the liberty to leave the NCSoft family to look for another publisher. They are in a similar situation like Black Isle was with Interplay. Heads of Interplay made stupid business decisions and Black Isle was sacrificed.

On the other hand NCSoft hasn't had another successful worldwide product launch since Guild Wars came out. It's their star alongside of some cash cows (marketing terms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCG_growth-share_matrix).

Even if Tabula Rasa flops (TR is the Duke Nukem Forever in the MMO segment) and NCSoft would be in serious financial trouble, Anet wouldn't get axed until the very last.

Ok, thats just cold... at least TR has an closed beta about to start... DNF's screenshots will be 10 years old in april...

TR & DNF have some similarities as in development time and getting trashed after a while and getting restarted. I actually hope that both games will be successful and don't turn Daikatana. I still like to play D3D with new open source engines.

...And Amazon.com taking preorders...

D'Oh!

WARNING: This post may induce crying!***

(I just thought this was hilarious and decided to share it with you guys)

This time line was posted by someone in the official forums back in 2004. The post was deleted:

LOL!

*** Cries of sadness or laughter? upto you!

For those that apparently didn't know this:

"!=" is the symbolic equivalent of "does not equal" or "is not the same as". For example...

Quote:

Originally Posted by zwei2stein making less profit != dying

...well, you get the idea.