NCsoft Q1 2010 financials out: ouch.

All it needs now is some tanks or worms shooting each other.

Using a conservative estimate for costs incurred during development, which assumes an average salary of £32,000/year with costs per person of a further £32,000 a year, if Paragon Studios has 50 full time development staff, their costs already exceed £3.2m a year, without factoring in costs for CS staff, investement in new server tech, or maintenence of existing servers.

As long as CoX remains an actively developed game, these costs will hang over Paragon Studios/NCSoft, and all profit figures will be effected by them. There are also unknown variable costs at work here (What with the economy still turbulent in areas), which could cause dips on figures shwoing the bottom line.

It's a lot harder than assumed to be successful in the gaming industry.

just for the larger perspective subby, do you follow the financial results of other nc soft and non ncsoft games, maybe lorto, eq2, even co if you can find it. basically anything over a few months old but wow, free realms and eve? are other ones showing robustness now, or is the economic funtime perhaps affecting us all. I recall on kotaku they quoted an activision exec as saying that even wow is no longer growing... it isnt dying by any means, but even it is showing slowdown.could you whip us up some comparison?

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Did you know that Capcoms Net Profit was down 73.1% over last years?

The drop in year-on-year quarterly sales is substantial, and has to be a reason for concern.

On the other side, you could argue that when more players return to their games after the economy improves, the updated graphics engine and GR place COX quite well to have a decent rebound in subscriptions.

I LOVE zone events.

Heh, if you live in California, anything less than six figures is barely allowing you to eat with the cost of living here...

I don't know if these figures mean a great deal unless compared to other MMO figures. I'd suggest that the global recession has had a big impact on the games industry generally.

The recession and a lack of new content has inevitably had a detrimental effect on numbers but I wouldn't start crying doom yet. When War Witch took over her new cry was "Content, Content, Content" a recognition that they needed to introduce much more content to the game and I17 reflected that. However those numbers won't have impacted at this stage.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

Is anyone really surprised by these numbers? I personally have had to make monetary sacrifices in my household to account for the loss of business in my field.

Either way, I don't really care. I'll play this game until the servers shut down.

Unpopular as it may make me I solely blame the lack of income on how the devs have handled farming, pvp changes and new issue releases.

Farming was an unclear issue for a long time, a lot of the players didnt approve of it back before MA came out as it was, the release of MA killed EU servers more or less, the population became overwhelmed with a lot of AE noobs and this drove the vets away, then a couple of months later the AE noobs went too because they had already farmed the highest level content and got bored. I cant say how it was in america at that point because I wasnt there but if it was anything like that then its a valid point. As well as this we had the stage where everything to devs were updating, was just another exploit fix for bugged AE missions, which also annoyed a lot of people since they werent doing much else except nerfing what they saw as good exp. It shouldnt have been that easy to exploit in the first place. Then they completley nuked the exp in MA which left a lot of the MA farmers out and got them annoyed, now they put it back again and people are back to farming. Having on/off changes like this every two minutes makes people not want to play it or make content because they dont know what the next nerf is going to be.

PvP changes were a big part of the game for a fair amount of players, with i13 the devs promised a decent, working and fair combat system. What we got is a more unbalanced system than ever and a system that quite frankly, fails. DR was a bad idea to start with, how damage is calculated now also sucks, the way status changes are handled is rubbish and even PvP IOs are damn near impossible to get. Theres more issues than whats listed but there all over pvp forums so I dont need to go into detail. The point is though, alienating your veteran players with PvP by bringing in a crap system that fails for the sake of people who dont even play the pvp system is an idiotic move. Mixed with the lack of any real updates in issues afterwards made a lot of old skool pvpers leave. Having vet pvpers leave whilst attempting to bring newer ones in is a bad idea as well since your losing your sub from people leaving, your not gaining anything from new players coming in.

New issue releases have also been very poor, or very poorly brought in as of late. The last few issues have had very little real content compared to earlier issues and the ones that do make a difference like i17, have been brought in with a stupid amount of bugs that were reported and ignored in beta just so they could rush a release for the anniversary. Some players crash at tailors and talking to contacts, some lag like hell and dc all the time, some cant even log in. If you want to chase away your players, this is the way to do it.

All in all, its the devs and marketings choices that are pushing more people away, not the age of the game. If i17 was implemented properly Im sure it would encourage more players in with new graphics since that was the biggest issue with the game, since it looked so dated. However if we continue getting gamechanging 'updates' such as the pvp change, you will surely only alienate even more vets.

Learn from Star Wars Galaxies mistakes, once you have the game out theres no need to remake the entire thing again, players play the thing as it is. Changing the entire thing does nothing but annoy players who enjoy the current system.

Thats not to say players dont enjoy updates, but they should be kept to things that dont affect the game mechanics. i13 pvp was a bad move for instance and proof is in the fact now that you have less pvpers than ever. Despite if Positron or Castle think pvp is fine now, there not the entire community and if they like it, good for them but the players actually playing it tend to hate it.

As I mentioned above, if you need evidence that game mechanics changes arent good, look at NGE for star wars galaxies, within a year the game was dead. Its a miracle Sony still bother to keep it open.

GR could be a savior to the game if its brought in well but I suspect there will be a lot of 'lets wait and see' players that wont buy the game until they see how the population is affected. EU in particular arent happy with how marketing is handling stuff there. Keeping the servers for EU seperate from the list of American servers and charging for a completley seperate game despite it being the exact same thing was a bad idea as well. I dont know of any other game who does this.

Many EU players (me included) have gone to america simply because theres more players. A lot more have actually left the game because of it since they dont want to buy everything all over again. If I could have EU servers in the same list as american ones Id be more inclined to make a charecter there.

I'm going to post something here that's completely relevant to this that I posted over on the Unleashed boards:

The Fallacy of Perpetual Growth

This is the cause of many of the failings of the modern world. It is a function of greed. It is the concept that has been pushed out by MBAs (Masters of Business Administration) and slowly infected into every publicly owned business like a disease. It's the fallacy of perpetual growth.

If you have ever worked for ANY public company in any kind of position higher than entry level, you've seen this in one form or another. Metrics, bean counters, that all say "THIS quarter must have better numbers than LAST quarter!" and "THIS quarter must have better numbers than the same quarter last year!".

That is the fallacy of perpetual growth. You also see this in the government. In fact, social security is BASED on the concept that there will always be a larger and larger working class to pay for the ever growing retired class.

But it is indeed a fallacy, IT'S NOT THE WAY REALITY WORKS. Things ebb and flow, the economy ebbs and flows, business success and consumer purchasing ebbs and flows. Business should fluctuate WITH it.

This is why the most stable companies that exist today are sole-proprietor companies or family owned businesses. Oh sure, most of them are not huge and most of them are not global. Hell, very few are even national. But they are ALWAYS THERE.

Why? Because when one person or a small group has a personal stake in the company, they don't have to be beholden to stockholders and the fallacy of constant growth. If my company profited 100K net last year, and this year is a "tough" year, I don't HAVE to drive for 125K or 150K or even 100K... I can be happy with LESS. I can be happy making a MEASLY profit as long as we stay stable and stay in business and don't lose money. I can take the LONG view.

If I don't have the money to increase my business, I can WAIT and SAVE the money and buy expansions outright in my own time. The growth of my business can be related to the success of my business. If I'm doing poorly and have a small franchise, I can cut one or two stores out and sell them off and keep the rest operating the same way. I don't have to cut corners everywhere and stress every one of my employees out. I don't HAVE to make them "do more with less".

Public companies can't do that. They are pushed on all sides for ever increasing profits and ever expanding GROWTH of the company.

And do you know what I see happening? In every business that I've ever worked with? The company is becoming a behemoth monster, constantly growing in size, while at the same time eating itself from the inside out, until all that's left is a gigantic skeleton with no meat left... just scrawny bones that can collapse or any moment.

Or better yet, a better example is Jenga. Yes, Jenga.



THAT is the end result of the fallacy of perpetual growth. You pull from the bottom to feed the top and guess what's going to happen? Eventually, it's all going to tumble down.

So what do I suggest? Let all these companies wear themselves out and eat their infrastructure from the inside out. Let them topple and fall, and the smartest ones among them, the ones that have had to "make do with less" for years and years and years and learn how to be innovative to not lose their jobs.... when they finally lose their jobs because the entire business collapses... they can start their own business... and OWN it.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is.... the concept of the public company has failed in my opinion, and we need to go back to the concept of the private company.

Because private companies are not subject to the fallacy of perpetual growth.