Pebblebrook

It could be odd, or it could just be coincidental.

NCSoft's stock price peaked on 9/7, the start of the drop was it's next trading on 9/10.

Which seems to be similar to the pattern with Activision/Blizzard's stock that peaked at 9/6 (think that's on the same day as NCSoft's peak day...need to verify time difference in Korea) before showing a downward trend.

As some mentioned, it has more to do with the performances of their other mmos especially B&S and GW2 missing investor's target earnings forecasts.

One of the investor updates dated last week 11/7...from and by the actual investor, not NCSoft, seem to say B&S, though decent, was expecting to be like AION at its launch but it comes short of that and GW2, though again having a strong start, is showing decline in player activity.

Also partly attributing stern competition from games like League of Legends which is big over there and a bit of B&S siphoning off people from AION and L2.

They, like NCSoft, seem to be expecting a good/better quarter in 4Q but saying they expect it might peak there and taper off till they launch games in the rest of asia by end of 2013.


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As for CoX's closure's influence with investors, some hints of that could be surmised from a noticeable lack of mention about it in various reports and investor calls.

I can somewhat understand NCSoft not wanting to bring up the subject, but if it was as significant an event as it is for the players, for that topic to not be initiated by the investors seem a bit telling.

Yeah, i'm not sure either...though the specific job chart shows individuals reporting (205) shows a close number but still different to the data profile number (220).

So i thought maybe not being registered had something to do with it...oh well still interesting.

That's an interesting site but not sure if i'm looking at the right place, or probably it's only showing a small portion to unregistered viewers.

But what looks like a list of entries for the video game designer category is showing only 220 data profiles and clicking it brings up a chart that says 205 individuals reporting (for that chart)

How many data points does it show for you?

It was mentioned as a rumor that was born from misreading a quote.

But in that version, $80 million was the bid price offerred to NCSoft and now $80 million is the NCSoft asking price.

$80 million must be an interesting number, it keeps showing up in one form or another.


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Since we're talking about offers...separate question to AvelWorldCreator.

Setting aside the chosen method of communication (although, personally i would think asking one of the rednames to point you in the right direction would've gotten a better response than from customer support personnel)...but anyway, i know giving figures isn't always good prior to negotiations but since you're convinced there won't be any, it should be safe to say now.

If you were granted an audience, how much would your company be willing to offer?

I don't know about expecting, but they said they were hoping to last decades. And that 2025 comment was made jokingly if you watch that comic-con swtor panel at 30:10.

The laughter was lost when people did the transcript for it.

A mature rating on videogames have been less of a problem of late. Call of duty and other m-rated games can attest to that.

If there's something that would impede B&S' market penetration in the west, I would think the martial arts/asian theme or the business model they choose for it might have more of an effect.

...just a guess.

Hmm, i thought someone said the Trion thing was a rumor. Don't suppose that's been verified yet...would be interesting info if it was.

That's interesting. How do you know how much NCSoft was asking for?

Something interesting about that from their equity method page is that NC Interactive, in which Paragon Studios is under, has been negative every quarter consecutively since after 4Q 2009...shortly after the big revenue drop.

About the cannibalizing, they make it sound like it's mostly from AION and not Lineage in the call.

Commenting that Lineage decline is on its own but new in-game item promos happened near the end of the quarter so they're expecting that number to increase in 4Q...along with the rest of GW2's sales that wasn't recognized in 3Q.

Overall, they're expecting next quarter sales to be better.

It is curious that they chose to use those words, but "realignment of company focus and publishing support" carries a typical PR feel to it that it sounds vague enough to not be able to completely rule out or rule in, CoX's financial standing as one reason for that realignment.

Because of that, one can easily spin it to mean their publishing support for Paragon studios is no longer desirable "because" of what CoX's revenue track record looks like and can't justify continued "focus" of resources for Paragon's future projects when their current one is under-performing.

Or it can also be spun that other way you mentioned. PR can be annoying that way, hehe.

Ooh, that 700k number is interesting, where have you seen that? Only official statement i've seen was a vague below 1mil but well above 500k comment in their conference call.

The 500k break-even point, i have seen but that statement was made at least a year before their "restructuring" so their new break-even point is not yet known but likely to be less than 500k.

Well, i like to think all my questions are honest ones.

And i do check those sites, but if you quoted further down that post, i also mentioned that most of the ones i saw was pretty much just reporting the event without additional commentary as to the health of the game, or the ones that did have a commentary tone i have found, tended to be written by someone who plays or played CoX. Which then, the description of "people from here" would apply.

But i always ask in case i missed something...i don't exactly have spiderbots that scour the internet for me or anything hehe.

Which gaming magazines/sites described the closure as premature?

Most of the news about it was pretty straightforward report of the event. The blogs that i found that had a more emotional take tends to be authored by people that play(ed) CoX.

Those can be considered as people "from here."

Dang, i glossed over this...that's happening too often now

Yes, $8-20mil sounds like a reasonable offer from a seller's point of view if that were the bids with $15mil probably a contender. $8mil would probably be too low for NCSoft to consider selling but an ok starting point

But from an investor's view, i would think even $15mil would be an uncomfortable risk. Unless they already have something set up, they still have to establish the infrastructure to operate the game which would add to the initial investment.

Not sure how much that added cost would be but maybe a hint from when Turbine decided to run DDO on their own without a publisher after getting an $18mil funding from a vc.

So the time to recoup their investment would get jacked up to years even if they slash to a skeleton crew. Then again, CoX is primarily a content-driven game...with decreased staffing, it could affect rates of development and run risk of more people leaving or spending less, and increasing the time to recover their money. Also considering CoX's revenue was still expected to decrease before the closure.

And that $18mil turbine example was back in 2003...not sure if that's still reasonable today.

Heh, that might be too out there for me. Garriot had a hand in many NCSoft projects that went west being the CEO.

He was also instrumental in resurrecting Dungeon runners (which tanked) and of course Tabula rasa which allegedly cost $100mil which also tanked by only getting $11 mil for the year it was running. (In comparison, CoX during that same period made $28mil)

CoX probably was one or the only one that Garriot was involved in that made enough money. Maybe that's why among the NCSoft shuttered games, CoX is the only one that lasted longer than 3 years.

But if it wasn't about money and were just a grudge against him...the perfect time to wash their hands of him completely would've been when Cryptic decided to work on a directly competing product (MUO) and maybe just let them keep CoX and part ways then.

But we're back to CoX making $25mil that year being too tempting to let go.



* Again, the above is mostly speculation...it's a bit fun to put on the tinfoil every now and then till more credible information shows up.

Yeah, without more solid facts it's just a watercooler discussion. But that complicaton, is that different from the rumored disagreements about some legalese NCSoft wanted with the deal is it?

As tinfoil hat theories go, i have something similar but it has CoX's revenue history and future outlook as well as loss in confidence in Paragon's ability to develop a growing revenue stream, as a more central theme.

If CoX's yearly revenues stayed at the same level and/or rose from the time of the Cryptic buyout ($25mil) instead of what it's looking to be in 2012 ($9-10mil), then i would believe that we wouldn't have this discussion and NCSoft would probably might have greenlit another project for Paragon even with GW2 and B&S planned launching in NA.

I also have a more outlandish variation of that tinfoil theory in which Paragon deciding to go forward with the other project without NCSoft's full backing so without additional staffing funds, they started poaching people off of CoX probably around the time Second Measure announced his job role change in February this year and NCSoft didn't appreciate that.

Yeah, that one's a bit more out there.

But in any case, tinfoil or not...i still believe they wouldn't shut it down if revenues were still high.

There have been news from the start about attempts to a buyout when a redname reportedly outted about talks with NCSoft and investors.

But what still is not known is exactly what kind of money were offered. Without that, there would be questions behind the investors' thoughts on the game's profitability.

The only rumored amount someone mentioned was $3mil. If that were true then i suppose the investors seeing yearly revenues of at least $10mil would definitely think they would get their money back and be worth the investment...even if it meant slashing the staff and taking it to maintenance mode for a year then restaff after they get their money back.

But then $3mil is not really a reasonable offer.

What numbers are you referring to that makes you believe mtx revenue isn't included?

I think the term "very" with profitable could be debated but you referenced a fact with that statement.

Is that something you can link to?

Not sure how accurate that $10k/mo/person figure is, but if applied to the 80 people that was at Paragon, that would be about $800k/mo in average personnel expenses. So it might be possible Positron meant $500k minimum in a month.

So possibly, their quarterly cost could be from $1.5mil ($500k/mo) to $2.4mil ($800k/mo)...does that sound right to anyone else?

[Edit]
If that is anywhere close to true, using CoX's last quarter revenue (2Q12) of $2,469,437...a possible ballpark guesstimate for CoX's profit could be from $23k/mo to $323k/mo.
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EDIT: Just saw your reply Arcana, thanks for that. What about the $10k/mo/person statement from the link above. The author appears to be an app developer so not sure about his knowledge of MMO dev studios, but does that sound reasonable?