NCsoft Q1 2008 Financial Results Announced

If I'm not mistaken, there's been a revival following a few cool recent updates.

It's very strange that GW continues to generate revenues, but very happy that it does! Let's go and recruit some newbies .

gw sales are still high because of the high usd/eur rate as a big share of their gw sales is in europe.
still very good to see that q1 2008 did better then christmas season 2007, and without new expansions.

Sales are probebly higher Q1 2008 then Winter sale 2007 because of there new licence terms for Gold farmers/BOTS. Everytime they ban one they go and buy a new account witch in turns gives mony to NCsoft and they do there happy dance and ban some more... More mony.

My guess is that one can pay the server fees *and* the payroll for 135+ employees for roughly 3 million a month. If not then I think they really need to take a look at either operating costs or yearly salaries. Even if half of that went to overhead that would leave nearly 130k per year per employee and that would be quite high (many of those employees will not make anything close to that, nor should they be at 50% overhead with that monthly intake).

Even if Blizzards numbers are off by a factor of 5 they make more than the rest of the MMO industry combined (and NCSoft is pretty much MMO only). So, yes, that would be true. They also make more than any other game company on the planet I know of and only get beat in the IT industry as a whole when you start looking at long term entrenched infrastructure companies like Microsoft.

If beating WoW in revenue (or even coming close) is a sign of success then the whole gaming industry might as well shut down and we all play WoW as *no one* even comes close to competing. Heck WoW has a user base that the vast vast vast majority of companies that produce single player offline games would give their first, second, third (and usually all) born children to have - let alone giving them a monthly fee. For the rest of the world 9.1 million a quarter for a three year old game (with expansions ) is an unmitigated success - without WoW GW is one of the very top producers in the game, few games compare.

However if it really bothers you go play WoW - you will be secure in knowing you are the "winner".

Has CoH always been like this, or is it because of the announcement of Champions Online? At least with Guild Wars we're getting a straight up sequel, and the promise if being able to carry over, at least some of our content. But CoH is basically being completely replaced by a better game, even if they are still releasing updates for it, I wouldn'd be comfortable continuing to pay the subscription.

I actually think WoW's dominance is going to be terrible for the MMORPG market. Now we are going to have a bunch of wannabe WoWs coming out instead of companies making a product that will make them unique and standing out. Personally I feel Arenanet is going down that path...but I suppose thats for another thread.

You're right, but very strangely, WoW are 10 millions+ subscribers (approximately 2 in Europe, 2.5 in North America, and 5.5 in Asia), while Lineage II has 17 millions+. And 2nd life is about 12 millions. (numbers not accurate and grabbed for different places)

Yet Wow/Blizzard is far ahead of its "competitors" and something tells me that, even if it's a "nice" game/MMO (relatively speaking), they're much more aggressive (see TV ads, card game) and targetted at a wider audience. But somewhat, I feel that their success is more due to the social status of WoW (see the US congressman who made a rally in WoW) that to their technical or business brilliance.

I think 2008 is going to be a very interesting year for MMOs, AoC is just starting and other big MMOs are coming. Can't wait for the first announcements about GW2.

CoH/CoV is utter crap, tried that shit Q_Q

The only thing that might compel me to ever play that game is the chance to kill British... I hate that stupid avatar... and relish the thought of wiping him out in yet another Garriot game...

Lies, damned lies and stastics. Individual video games may outcompete individual movies, but the industries are miles apart. The movie industry encompasses box office, DVD sales, rentals, digital downloads, merchandising, and spinoffs. Hollywood is still soundly crushing the video game industry beneath its boots when you factor in all the revenue streams that it's dipping into.

I've brought this dumb argument to task before as well. You're absolutley right: just because WoW is number one doesn't mean any individual competitor isn't successful. It just means that, though successful, that competitor is not number one.

I've personally read this said and repeated in many places. But I'm not sure it's true now that you point to this:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/new...hp?story=17905

Only $670 millions? Here it says $1.3 billion:
http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2008/03...34%25-february

It doesn't seem a lot compared to the movie industry, but I also found that with a quick googling:
http://www.videogamesblogger.com/200...ry-in-2008.htm

Software industry=videogames? This is getting interesting but not convincing yet. With hits like GTA IV surpassing the best movie sales (around $500 million in one week, vs accumulated $600 million for the ice-breaking movie), you can imagine it's going to happen, or it just happened maybe.

Wiki tells us it was a $9.5 billion market in the US. I didn't find exact numbers for the movie industry but it seems higher.

Lineage I and II both have about 1 million subscribers. At their highest point, Lineage I had about 3.2 million subscribers and Lineage II 2.1. So no idea where your numbers come from.
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html gives the best info.

The price in the store has no berring on ANets sales. The 9.1 mill in revenue refers to wholesale sales to the retail outlet, as well as merchandise and the online store. A Manufacture typically makes 10% - 20% gross profit of of it's wholesales sales, from there the retailer marks up the product 50% - 80% to sell the product at the MSRP (Manufactures Suggested Retail Price)

Once EB Games buys a copy of GW they pay ANet, and ANet adds that amount to it's revenue. Anet gets a check for the game, it most cases, before the game even hits the shelf. Then it's up to EB Games to sell the game for a profit, the MSRP being the baseline sale price. If EB Games sells it for $50 or $10 that sale does not reflect in ANets revenue, they we already paid the $10 - $15 that they charged EB Games. Yes 10 - 15 bucks is about where the wholesale price of GW is.

The Online store though, thats almost pure profit, alot less costs involed on ANets end as far as production, warehouseing, shipping, stock loss, and the sale is at retail pricing.

Don't forget Blizzard just purchased the domanin name www.Diablo3.com which had been a fan site, gee wonder what their plans are for that?

Production and manufacturing will go next, they can push the online store for sales instead of hard copies since they have a larger profit margin.

Agreed, couple no new content with new games from other manufactutres (Connan, Warhammer, ect) as well as ANets cost cutting and you will see they expect a drop too. THough they are currently holding steady, so who knows.

Always remember when looking at these numbers, it's not "revenue" you want it's "Net Profit" that's the important one.

The only company that can bring down Blizzard is Blizzard itself. They just can't afford to make a game that get's only 75% on Game rankings. That's the reason why Starcraft:Ghost was scrapped. But as long as Blizzard brings out the awesomeness, they are beyond competition. Anet is doing admirably compared to all MMO games exept WoW.

I suspect you probably won't without a lot of detective work. I figure that, like the music industry, if accurate figures were released, it would probably quickly torpedo their insane rantings about piracy and expose the problem for the tiny issue it really is, leading to greater to speculation that maybe - just maybe - the reason they're seeing a hit to their profit-taking is that most of the music and movies being created are non-saleable dog crap that nobody wants.

TR was an epic failure. Beta was shitty, pvp was non-existent.

Hmmm, was thinking through this as I read the posts. What is likely the average salary at Anet? Experienced software developers can be in the 75-120k range (typically, from what I've seen), but there's probably a lot lower paying jobs as well - can't imagine QA makes as much.

140 * 60,000(?) / 4 = 2,100,000

Then power & maintenance on the servers, office rental, etc.

True, however they aren't going to be anywhere close to all software developers. Typically in a company that size most are not developers. The top end of each division will most likely make in that range and then the lower ones will not. HR, support, secretaries, marketing, public relations, etc. Of course in a software company there will be a higher percentage of developers but it still is rarely above 50% in large companies.

Not to mention that most revenue tends to come in spurts from releases - a large portion of non-subscription/service based software companies (at least the ones I have either worked for or consulted for) operate off that money at some point. If they can pay their bills from existing sales even better.

Anet is in good shape - if they are this far into the development cycle of GW2 and are still well in the black on a quarterly basis from GW1 sales they are a one of the better gaming success.

so i guess its safe to say that blizzard now makes a ton of more money than ncsoft...

Aion is going to be hot shit.

Hm... interesting...

So were's my share?

You get to play a game without having to pay a monthly fee.

Wow.

After looking that up, it stuns me that Lineage 1, a game that is now just over ten years old, is still pulling in that much money. The screenshots are flattering toward Diablo 2, and I'm pretty sure EverQuest (an MMO from the same era that also happened to be 3D) doesn't have that kind of a subscriber base despite being pretty much the king when it was newer.

the reason guild wars was 9.1 million is because they keep repackaging the same games with a different mini or what ever but it is the same games which means except for price of packaging the cost of the game was made up long ago so each time it is repackaged it is profit.

Variable sales cost could refer to Box sales. There has been a big push to use the "in game store" or the NCSoft webstore to make game purchases. This makes some sense because, if you have the connection to play an online game, you must have the connection to buy it and download it online. It reduces the cost of manufacturing and shipping, and they get a larger share of the profits by cutting out the middle man (store retailer).

I know I purchased Factions and EOTN from the ingame store... I can't remember where I purchased NF. Those sales produced a much larger profit for NCSoft than if I were to have purchased the games at Future Shop or Best Buy or whathaveyou.

They probably make more money by moving sales to the in-game store than by laying off a few support agents.

why dig up financial thread from almost 5 months ago?