NCSoft – Page 11 – MMO Fallout

NCSoft Third Quarter Finances

NCSoft has released their third quarter finances, and the news is good. While sales decreased 1% since last quarter, they amounted to approximately $195 million. Operating profit increased 25% quarter over quarter to $74.15 million, with pre-tax income up 33% and net income up 43% to $79 million and $69 million respectively.

Increased revenue was attributed to sales in Aion, Lineage, Lineage II, and Blade & Soul in Korea. Wildstar’s income dropped substantially, down to $14 million from $27 million during its launch quarter. Guild Wars 2, meanwhile, had its third straight quarter of falling revenue, down to $17.95 million from $21 million last quarter and $31 million of its previous peak in the fourth quarter of 2013. Korea once again made up the bulk of NCSoft’s sales, an increase over last quarter to 65%. The US and EU, which were combined into the same category, amounted to 18% of sales, with Japan at 5%, Taiwan at 1% and an addition 10% from royalties.

(Source: NCSoft)

NCWest Layoffs Inbound Across All Departments

NCSoft has confirmed a round of layoffs at its western operations, affecting all of its studios outside of ArenaNet. The layoffs come as a result of “restructuring of key operations within NC West,” as the developer pushes towards mobile and tablet gaming, as well as emerging technologies. Polygon has cited an unnamed source stating that over sixty members of the Carbine Studios team were laid off.

The statement by NCSoft:

Today we announced a restructuring of key operations within NC West. As a result of this restructuring, we are implementing staff reductions across our Western operations with the exclusion of ArenaNet. While decisions like this are always hard, they are necessary as we begin the implementation of a new strategy designed to strengthen our footing as a leader in global entertainment.

Moving forward, we will continue to focus on our core development capabilities and the intellectual properties (WildStar, Aion, Lineage, and Guild Wars franchises) that have made NCSOFT what it is today. However, we are looking to move into new business segments like mobile and tablet games as well as explore emerging technologies.

Again, the decision to reduce staff was not an easy one, and we sincerely wish everyone well in their next endeavors.

(Source: Polygon)

[Editorial] Gem Store Update Poorly Introduced, Response Even Worse

The latest gem store update to Guild Wars 2 has had players up in arms, and it’s hard not to sympathize with their position. Previously, buying and selling gems was a process that involved deciding how much you wanted to buy/sell, setting an asking price, and waiting until your order was filled. If you wanted enough gems for a Black Lion chest key, you could get it. If you had 124 gems and wanted an item that cost 125 gems, you could buy that extra gem.

If you can figure out what is wrong with the new gem shop interface in the screenshot above, you probably don’t work for Arenanet. Given that the trade shop was built to be flexible and user-friendly, the change to a system that is entirely based on fixed, inflexible increments seems counterproductive and quite baffling in its logic, but so far Arenanet doesn’t seem to understand why players would be angry about being forced to buy 400 gems minimum.

As seems to be the popular excuse, Arenanet blamed the update on new players not understanding the system, a problem that apparently only exists in Arenanet’s customer support tickets. Communications team lead Gaile Gray has not helped the situation by going on the offensive against players in the forums. In her first response, Gray explained that “very few people bought gems at smaller denominations.” Following pages of complaints and suggestions, Gray made another post making no acknowledgement of the previous suggestions and instead decrying “most” of the posters as nonconstructive ranters.

Ok, guys. Some of you are unhappy about this change, I can see that. BUT… quite honestly, most of you are sort of (I hate to use the word) ranting (sorry!) instead of offering suggestions.

The comment on this update being geared towards new players is suspicious at best, considering that the lowest increment of gems now costs 75 gold. How many new players are going to have 75 gold to spend on the gem store? None. The only impact that this could conceivably have on new players is to remove their ability to purchase smaller amounts of gems and funnel them toward buying the gems with real money.

Guild Wars 2 has a habit of introducing updates which beg the question “who asked for this?” The answer is usually a lot of unseen people who submit support tickets and then apparently never feel the need to discuss the matter anywhere else, because if you searched the forums you wouldn’t come up with many, if any, results.

Arenanet has already confirmed that an update will allow player to use either system to their choosing, begging the question on why it wasn’t just included in the first place.

Wildstar Merger Nukes Low Level Inactive Characters

Carbine Studios is set to launch the Wildstar megaservers this week, on Wednesday October 15th. Players will be grouped into one of four servers, based on their physical location (US and EU) and server type (PvE or PvP). Due to the complicated nature of the merger, Carbine Studios is expecting a downtime of twelve to twenty four hours, which will be compensated in the form of thirty Boom-Boxes and an extra day of game time. To avoid naming issues, players will be required to create unique surnames. Guilds with conflicting names will hand priority over to the oldest guild, with the newer one being forced to change its name.

As part of the update, characters under level 3 that are inactive (not logged in within 30 days of the merger) will be deleted.

(Source: Wildstar)

Wildstar State of the Game

Carbine Studios has released the latest State of the Game address for Wildstar. After hitting some hurdles with population and having to drop their monthly update plan, Mike Donatelli posted a list of updates that are currently in the works for the next update. Players can look forward to new zones, new lore, and other content updates in addition to the tackling of long standing bugs in need of squashing.

Two new chapters of content, including solo, five-player, and 20-man events.
Fully voiced NPCs in new zones.
Option to skip the tutorial on alts.
Various improvements to low level zones.
Combat balances.
Bug fixes and long-demanded tweaks to UI, mechanics, and more.

(Source: Wildstar)

Wildstar Announces Server Mergers

Mega servers are the future, at least in the sense that they allow developers to merge servers without using the term and acting like there is nothing to worry about with the population. Wildstar developer Carbine Studios has revealed that the fledgling MMO will soon see its servers merged similar to DC Universe Online, with one PvE and one PvP server per cluster.

Going the Megaserver route means that we vastly increase server capacity allowing for greater critical mass of our player base, resulting in more people, more groups, more activity and more raids… more of everything that makes WildStar so fun. The Megaservers and their increased player capacity will give fans more options to group up and enjoy WildStar with friends and other players for a long time to come.

To avoid name conflicts, all players will be given a last name.

(Source: Wildstar)

City of Heroes: The Mask Comes Off

At this point in time, the idea that there are talks underway to get City of Heroes back up and running isn’t a secret. The previously unnamed team has been negotiating with NCSoft to acquire City of Heroes with the request that the negotiations themselves be kept secret and with the knowledge that the whole deal could fall apart at any moment, or could never have had a chance of succeeding in the first place. Today, Nathan Downes of Missing Worlds Media (who we spoke to in our most recent interview) posted an update on the negotiations.

You can read the entire post at the link below, but Downes summarizes the proposal as it stands currently.

The proposal as it stands right now (this is not a final form, just the current proposal on the table) is this:

The CoH IP would be spun to its own company, to handle licensing. This company would itself license the existing engine from NCSoft for the creation of a maintenance mode, using a binary copy of the i23 server.
The existing user database and characters are not part of this arrangement at this time, nor is the source code.
An arrangement is to be made to license the trademarks to the various Plan Z projects, CoT, Valiance and H&V, to create a family connection, and to allow each to drop the “Spiritual” portion of successor. This means they can make references to the original game if desired, and to enable the expansion of partnerships. This could be expanded for any of them, should the desire be there.
An arrangement is also to be made for the Atlas Park Revival project. As part of the informal agreement we have with them, they would be given an official stamp of approval, and the CoT game build would be licensed to them, to create a kind of “CoH 1.5” and migrate people off of the classic game engine before it finally becomes unsuitable (we expect this to happen around when Windows 9 is released, due to binary compatibility). This can be done because both APR and CoT run on Unreal Engine 4.
By being its own firm, the licensing company can also pursue other avenues which were unavailable before.

(Source: Titan Forums)

How City of Heroes Could Have Avoided The Press

I’ve known about negotiations between unnamed buyers and NCSoft to purchase City of Heroes, the fact that attempts to buy the game have been ongoing since it shut down in 2012 should be of little surprise to anyone given the game’s fiercely loyal fanbase and revenue margin. I haven’t run any stories on it, and not because it was requested of me to keep the matter quiet (and it was), but because the story doesn’t have a whole lot of meat to it. Truth be told, there are always attempts by developers and indie outfits to purchase defunct MMOs and nine times out of ten nothing comes as a result of the “negotiations.” To write a story about the potential deal would only serve as a hype piece, and to provide a scapegoat for the community if and when the negotiations finally fell through.

And then Massively wrote an article, and what do you know? There are some who not only have already blamed Massively for messing up the deal, but are claiming that it was an intentional act of sabotage.

Justin’s articles are always belittling CoH and the fact that the playerbase continues to try. (Mostly because of his inherent hard-on for SWG.)

I saw that to and am annoyed. My trust in massively.com has gone down because of that. Like, seriously can’t they respect us until we got more details and the deal comes through? Can’t they wait for this deal and the team to finish or fail before posting about it? But the way Justin talks it’s clear he doesn’t give a crap.

On the other hand it has been requested time and again that people keep it low key while the negotiations are going on, so if Justin really does have some sort of animosity towards CoH and the associated community posting an article on Massively right at a time when negotiations are supposed to be at a critical stage could be a very deniable way to try to hinder the deal.

It almost seems like it was done purposefully. If the guy scoured the forum pages in an effort to undermine the effort, then he is truly a spiteful, little, miserable man.

If the team negotiating the deal didn’t want the situation being discussed, they shouldn’t have discussed it. Rather than keeping the situation quiet, however, small updates on the negotiations have trickled out onto the publicly available forums of the game’s most popular fansite, by a moderator of said forums, in a thread stickied to the top of the category called “new efforts,” in the section labeled “task force hail mary,” with a timeline of said statements compiled in the original post, with more than two hundred thousand views and nine thousand replies.

The answer to not wanting publicity is to not talk about the matter publicly. Loose lips sink ships, and a major gaming press website writing a story about this was guaranteed to happen sooner or later with chatter on the Titan forums growing larger every day. If anything, the surprise is that it took this long for a news site to jump on board.

NCSoft Q2 2014 Finances

NCSoft has posted their second quarter finances for 2014 and the results are looking good across the board. Thanks to strong launches including Guild Wars 2 in China and Wildstar in the US and EU, NCSoft saw a 20% increase in sales, a 46% increase in profit, and a 45% increase in net income over the previous quarter. Lineage 1, meanwhile, increased in sales thanks to a solid base.

Wildstar debuted to $27 million in sales during its first posted quarter. Sales in Europe and North America have been consolidated into a single metric, not so surprising when you consider that Europe had dropped to just 3% of NCSoft’s sales with North America at 13%.

MMOrning Shots: High Finance

Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from, well, me. Those of you who follow MMOrning Shots know that I occasionally use this as a platform to make website announcements. Last year I ran a Lineage of Support for NCSoft, and I planned on integrating this into the website on a more permanent basis. One thing led to another, I got busy, and the details were never hashed out.

I’ve long wanted MMO Fallout to have more resources available to viewers, and compiling some of the more business-focused pieces of content is step one in accomplishing that goal. Part of that step is to make sure that said content has more publicity than a simple post on the front page that is obscured after a day or two.

I will have more details likely next week. Check out MMOrning Shots on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

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