NCSoft Fiscal Year 2007

GW is a two year old game. The fact that Tablua Rasa didn't beat it when it premeired is bad. Also keep in mind TR is subscription based, so some of that 5.4mil came from monthly fees. TR was supposed to be Richard Garriet's great new thing. I was really hyped for the thing myself. Unfortunately, it was a big disappointment. Still, it probablly did a lot better then auto assault.

"Guild Wars® saw [its] respective sales drop ... 29% to ... KRW 9.2 billion (US$9.9 million)"

So, GWEN raked in,or helped rake in, during Quarter 3, about 12 or 13 million US Dollars, and then another 9.9 on top of that. $21 million, give or take, in two quarters, for a franchise over two years old? Not shabby, I would guess.
Or at least, I'm impressed, but I'm not a business or math person.

I've been waiting for this, now we can stop worrying about their income and suggesting they switch to a monthly cost plan, hmm?

Gaile didn't lie when she said they were doing well, and GW2 should cause a major spike.

Just a word of caution, these are NCsoft's figures. Anet's figures can be vastly different, depending on the fiscal relationship between NCsoft and Anet. I wouldn't get really excited at these figures without information on Anet's fiscal stats for 2007.

As long as ANet is still making profits for NCSoft (or shows the potential to make more in the future), I don't think NCSoft is going to let them go broke...

And as Ravious pointed out: Those sorts of figures would actually be quite good for a game that isn't selling any new releases (okay, there is the BMP...). I'd actually imagine the Q4 sales include some late purchasers of EOTN, and the profit margin is actually going to drop faster than 29%/quarter between now and the release of GW2.

I hope Tabula Rasa can raise its profits next quarter as it really has huge advantage of not having a major competitor as far as genre goes.

Unless I'm mistaken, is there another MMO/shooter out there that is a space marines type game? I know Halo is extremely popular but that's not a an MMO.

Anet Doing nicely

Mass Effect is cornering the sci-fi nerds at the moment. But it's a single player RPG, not an MMO. TR still has no real dirret competition, but they do have similar games peeling people off (including me).

Vigil Games is working on a Warhammer 40,000 MMO game that may or may not have playable Space Marines, and BioWare Austin is working on an unknown MMO that may or may not be KotOR3.

Well that isn't too great at all...

If they can make a profit of $2.5 million in 2008 Q4, more than a year since they released their last major product, that's pretty darn good in my book.

Might not be good enough to keep the server running. Does anyone know how much servers costs in a year?

There have been VERY few games that reach that triple digits. WoW is pretty much the only MMO to do so, of course they pretty much smashed that line though. Compared to the rest of the market GW is one of the larger successes in the market - but then the rest market compared to WoW is also a "failure".

There is ample room for a game nearing three years old that still turns in almost 10 million. In fact, there is ample room for a *new* game that makes that. Especially considering that beats a VERY large portion of games that the industry calls successful - if what you say is true we might as well close all the video game shops out there and only sale WoW since no one out there can compete with them. You can insert *any* game out there, compare it to WoW, and declare it "increasingly difficult for them to compete in a market where the competition has vastly larger streams of income.".

GW is still one of the more profitable games out there, especially when one looks at the amount of money taken in over time. Heck it is one of the A-list games simply from the near 10 million income listed there.

Keep in mind that TR has monthly fees. A lot of people get turned off.

Because it's a freshly launched game with fees which was very expensive to develop but which just barely outperforms new sales of the almost three years old Guildwars, and is left in the dust of the also very old Lineage 2.
I do not think NCSoft was aiming so low that they're happy with that result.

It would surprise me greatly if it's anywhere near $1M. Also the whole point of GWs structure is that it scales easily. It's possible to reduce the servers down to a single computer running instances for one last player.

there is an ouch there because not only did TR (a brand new game) fail to match profits for GW (a 3 year old game) but it NCsoft was depending on the release of TR to be a major seller - in terms of what they were hoping for it really flopped.

3rd quarter profits for NCsoft as a whole last year had severely dropped and they were depending on TR to pull things up - it did not do so. Instead they received most profits from older games.

I hope ANET is getting their fair share of NCSoft profits, as ANET works on GW2.

Personally, I'm amenable to a "$10 bmp-like offer" for every quarter so it would somehow contribute to NCSoft and ANET's earnings this year until GW2 comes along.

I suspect we will indeed see something along those lines, yeah.

What are you talking about? Tabula Rosa made $5.4 million in Q4 at release.

Guild Wars made almost twice that a quarter after the release of GWEN!

In Q3, GW must have made $13.9 million, if after a 29% reduction it made $9.9 million in Q4.

Therefore, Tabula Rosa would have to make $18.4 million in Q1 2008 just to equal the launch of GWEN.

(I do recognize that GW has many factors that makes it more marketable than Tabula Rosa, but saying Tabula Rosa is beating Guild Wars is just nonsense!)

When it really should not have... /shrug