Father Xmas

Well they did buy Ntreev and one of their casual games is a Fantasy Baseball game. Of course that probably has nothing to do with this, probably a lot of baseball metaphors about skills or qualities desired.

I'm for a lapel pin. Back in the day, cuff-links or tie tacks.

And people wonder why NCSoft's stock is up and down like a yo-yo.

I was just going to ask that.

First Mercedes Lackey is probably the most "famous" member of our community who has outed herself. And as much work TonyV has done I'm pretty sure that even with the proper introductions, NCSoft would only politely listen to Tony and then promptly forget about him. Retweets are cheap, sorry Felicia Day, Neil Gammon, Sean Astin, thank you for spreading the word but ML actually offered her name to NCSoft to get their attention.

I'm willing to give Ms Lackey my full support in this endeavor. I want someone to step up and buy the game. Yes her posts may contain inaccuracies but she's an author who decided to take up this challenge and we are a bunch of people who are willing to dig through quarterly reports and several year old game closing announcements to point them out, which does nothing to move "the talks" forward.

The reason I post about the financials and projected subscription numbers is solely keep the exaggerated rumors about the success of this game grounded in some semblance of reality. Even if those rumors started or is repeated from one of Ms Lackey's posts.

All three companies have now laughed it off.

Nah he just played villains.

Afraid not since NCSoft owns ArenaNet where EA doesn't own Funcom.

I think it's more about assigning blame than relaying factual data.

I especially liked the stories that iPhone 5 sales would have a noticeable effect on the economy. You know why they only sold 5 million phones in 3 days? Because they only had 5 million phones to sell.

The original Guild Wars, according to NCSoft, sold a total of 7.1 million copies boxes over it's lifetime.

As for NCSoft's price, check out the 3 and 5 year charts, they are still up over that period. Their stock hit an all time high about a year ago and has pulled back since then. It's dropped a lot after their Q3 2011 report which showed sales down a lot. The next largest drop came with the Q1 2012 report the showed operating profits hadn't bounced back up from a dismal Q4 2011 levels.

It's not that EA closed the studio, it's just the founders left. Knew that last week. They made their killing selling out to EA, hung around for 5 years as EA VPs in charge of their not so little empire (5 studios in three countries) so now their are getting out before they watch EA suck their life's work into a dried up husk like they've done to so many studios. Their not even developers, just the original money guys with the money (they were medical doctors).

Good for them.

I think someone forgot that fact.

Well this may apply to this discussion.

Of course there's that pesky little section in the EULA that you agreed to every time you played the game since Freedom came out.

Very nice.

Going slightly off topic here, the last episode of Leverage last week had a Doctor Who reference as two of the characters introduced themselves as Agent Tennant and Smith of Interpol.

Well two words. Sid Meier. His stuff has rarely steered me wrong and it's his team that's behind it. They also seem to be big fans of the old game so hopefully those two factors mean that I won't be disappointed.

If they're in good condition and popular titles you could check with your local comic shops. Next would be getting a table at a weekly flea market and sell them to the public. Either way I wouldn't expect more than 10 cents on a dollar unless it's a very collectable issue in very good shape.

Even at $800K a year, that's not bad profit after all salary and expenses for a small company in a competitive market during a several year long economic downturn. Not bad for a private company.

It's just the $800K a month profit makes no sense since that figure is virtually identical to what NCSoft reported as the game's income. And at the income levels they were reporting before Freedom suggests a subscription base in the 60-80K range. Post-Freedom revenue hasn't altered significantly from pre-Freedom so it's equivalent to 60-80K subscribers.

As for cost of bandwidth, NCSoft reported bandwidth costs, world wide, all games, was only $4.9 million in Q2 2012. So really how much can our dinky little share cost?

As for the outcry about lack of advertising, how much of that is self validation? Something we can point at and say "see, that's what I play" to your WoW buddies. How did you feel when you saw our game on Chuck or in Big Bang Theory when Sheldon called us out by name? Face it, we all want recognition and seeing something you participate in on TV is a bit of an ego boost.

Advertising needs to be cost effective. You have to hook X number of people and get Y dollars out of them to break even. The cost of a nationwide primetime 30 second commercial isn't cheap. One on Chuck costs $50K in 2011. Big Bang Theory was almost $200K. I would imagine one on SyFy Monday nights (Alphas, Warehouse 13) costing at least $10-20K and Cartoon Network's DC Nation (assuming DC would allow it) or Toonami block maybe half that. And those costs are per spot. Of course WoW can afford TV commercials with the amount of money it brings in but there's a couple of orders of magnitude between WoW and us in terms of revenue.

No four months before the end of the fiscal year, that's your timing. It allows them to start with a clean slate of zero expenses relating to closing Paragon and shutting down the game for fiscal year 2013.

Thanks for the links.

I hope "Larry" isn't her financial adviser cause he can't read a quarterly or annual report if he confuses revenue with profit.

Second, stating again, Nexon does NOT own NCSoft. They own roughly 1/7th of NCSoft while "foreign" investors own nearly twice that. There's been no announcements about changes in the board of directors or senior management since the purchase.

The only "public" statements about aspects of the purchase, mentioned in phone transcripts of the quarterly investor's earning call, relates to a two year partnership where each company gets to "pick the brain" of the other about revenue generation and game design. Nexon uses a cash item shop only model. NCSoft's main source of income in Korea is from PC Bangs, where customers pay by the hour to play their games on top end gaming systems. Even in their other regions in Asia the standard method is by time card by number of hours a user wishes to play in a month. Two very different income models.

Flip side, game is still going until November 30th and the Paragon Market is still up and running and it appears that VIP tagged accounts is still getting their stipend so Paragon Points are still good.

There is probably some legal reason that establishes "gift card" sales purchased up to a week before of a "store's" closing must be refunded, no questions ask. I'm sure one of the reasons it took so long for us to get any information was NCSoft's legal team looking into what they MUST do under the law when it comes to purchased points.

Sentinel+ creates an XML file that contains not only your badges but all of your costumes and bio. Just follow the instructions.