NCSoft – Page 14 – MMO Fallout

Lineage II Top Reward Costs $200k Within A Year

As I always start these types of articles: If you are the type of person who is willing to spend five or six figures in a video game, why not take a little bit of that money and invest it in something more sensible, like MMO Fallout? Everyone wins. You get to keep spending insane amounts of cash on virtual goods, and we have more capability to tell you where you can spend a lot of money. Lineage II has revealed the hero coin program, allowing players to earn rewards for the simple act of spending their cash. The way the system works is simple: For every 80 NCoin you spend in Lineage II, you receive one Hero Coin that can be saved up and spent on items in the reward store.

Here’s where the deal gets controversial. First, Hero Coins only accumulate on the character that the item was redeemed on. Secondly, Hero Coins expire on the following January 1st of every year. There are items on the cash shop that translate into well over $30 thousand being spent on the game in a single year, with the most expensive item going over three hundred grand. You can laugh and, when you come to the realization that at least one person will hit that transaction mark, slowly dissolve into tears.

(Source: Lineage II)

Guild Wars 2 VIP Membership Discovered

Dataminers on Reddit unearthed the above information regarding a VIP membership for Guild Wars 2. Although no price is detailed, membership includes a bundle of extras, including bank and inventory space, convenient banking/trading, and more. There are at least 20 tiers, going by the VIP badges found in the Mists beta client. Mark Kerstein, Head of Global Community, commented on the forums to point out that the VIP member is an internal experiment and is not intended for western gamers.

This is a testing branch. We conduct internal experiments for various territories on our testing branches. This particular experiment is not being tested for the West.

Whether or not VIP will make it into Guild Wars 2 in any territory will have to be seen.

(Source: Reddit)

Blade & Soul Making Bank In China

Blade & Soul may not be coming westward for a while, but gamers in North America and Europe should be relieved to see that the game is performing exceptionally well in China. According to MMO Culture, not only is Blade & Soul on its way to surpassing two hundred servers, fifteen of which were added last week, the game has eighteen million active users. To top things off, the number of concurrent online users surpassed 1.8 million. To put that into perspective, if you took 1.8 million people, all of them would be playing Blade & Soul.

Look forward to Blade & Soul’s spike in revenue on NCSoft’s next quarterly report.

(Source: MMO Culture)

Lineage's 1.8 Billion Dollar, uh, Lineage

Lineage is NCSoft’s most successful title to date, launching in 1998 and still going strong fifteen years later in Korea and not in North America or Europe where the game was decidedly less popular. Still, Lineage has quite a following in Korea, Japan, China, and several other territories. With the game’s fifteen year anniversary a couple months behind it, NCSoft has revealed that Lineage has raked in $1.8 billion in sales. On second thought, that doesn’t sound impressive enough. Think of it as two trillion won, or ?2,000,000,000,000.

If South Korea celebrated Thanksgiving, I imagine the folks at NCSoft would be stuffing their turkey with money today.

(Source: Destructoid)

Lineage II’s New Race Coming In 2014

The fact that Lineage II launched ten years ago is hardly a deterrent for NCSoft, who continue adding in new content of rather substantial value on a decent basis, and it isn’t all just new areas and bigger toys to thwack creatures over the heads with. Last year, Lineage II players had the pleasure of witnessing a true rarity from the massive publisher: Rather than shut the game down and execute the studio, NCSoft admitted that a few years of poor decisions had left the game in a bit of a messed up state, and then did what few other MMO developers would do, they asked for feedback on how to go about fixing those problems.

The Ertheia is the newest race to come to Lineage II and is preparing to hit North American servers sometime next year to coincide with Lineage II’s ten year anniversary events. Check out the teaser trailer at the link below.

(Source: Lineage II)

Lineage II's New Race Coming In 2014

(Source: Lineage II)

NCSoft Operating Profit Down 51% Over Last Quarter

NCSoft has released their financial statements for the third quarter of 2013 and the results are not so great. While sales dropped only 12% over last quarter, operating profit dipped 51% over the same period and pre-tax income similarly dropped 47%. Net income stands at a 23% drop over the previous quarter. In the report, NCSoft links the loss of profit due to the “lion’s share of Lineage in-game item sales in 3Q being carried over to 4Q.”

On the game side, Lineage saw a nearly 27% drop in sales over the last quarter, while Blade & Soul enjoyed 40% rise in sales attributed to the “Baek-chung” content pack recently released for the game. Sales for Lineage 2, Aion, and Guild Wars 2 all dropped over the previous quarter.

According to NCSoft, while labor costs remained flat, royalty and marketing expenses increased due to a license contract with the Baseball Players Association and the Wildstar marketing campaigns respectively. Other expenses included the relocation of the NCSoft headquarters, restoration of the Seoul offices, and office supplies.

(Source: NCSoft Corporate)

[Community] NCSoft's Support Timeline

For this week’s Community Concerns, I decided to put together a graph of NCSoft’s library of MMOs, past and present. The above graph shows each game’s support timeline from the year it launched to the year that it shut down or to present if it is still running. Several of the titles may seem inaccurate as they are based on the Korean launch and may be a year or more ahead of their western launch, and at least one title has not launched in the west at all. I also decided to include Lineage as it is still in operation in Korea.

Keep in mind that Blade & Soul has not launched in the west and Lineage has shut down in the west.

[Community] NCSoft’s Support Timeline

Keep in mind that Blade & Soul has not launched in the west and Lineage has shut down in the west.

Wildstar Announces PLEX System

Carbine Studios has finally announced the monetization system for their upcoming game Wildstar, and it’s looking a whole lot like Eve Online. Wildstar will institute a system called C.R.E.D.D, which stands for Certification of Research, Exploration, Destruction, and Development. C.R.E.D.D will sell for $19.99 in real life money and can be sold to other players and redeemed for one month of subscription time. The idea is to allow one group of players to play without paying a subscription fee, as the money they make in-game will essentially pay for the subscription itself. The other group of players are those who would otherwise buy gold from gold farmers.

The Commodities Exchange, where players will be trading their goods, will operate much like RuneScape’s Grand Exchange: Anonymously.

“The CX is unique in that when a player wants to buy a particular commodity, they will only be able to buy that commodity at the lowest currently offered price, with no awareness of who’s actually selling it. Once the stock of that commodity at that price is gone, players will then be able to buy from the available stock at the next lowest price.”

Wildstar is set for a 2014 release. You can read more about it at MMORPG.com’s coverage below.

(Source: MMORPG.com)

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