NCsoft Q1 2010 financials out: ouch.

HAHA! Brilliant!

So, with all you people out there that care and know about such things... why hasn't a comparison been done yet to the other companies in the industry?

Not that I'm worried about the game nor the company. I just see lots of people pointing out the obvious lack of reference... but no information on it yet.



And... Westley... Just reading the starting title of your post, The Fallacy of Perpetual Growth, I knew we were on board with similar thoughts. It's a fact, but one that people just continually seem to think they can will away, hehe.
Silly humanses...

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

Paragon Studios almost certainly operates in US dollars, and doesn't convert their cash into Won every night and ship it back to Korea. I doubt any "exchange" actually takes place for the most part: the money starts in US dollars and stays in US dollars within the Paragon Studios entity.

The NCSoft reports are consolidated financials which almost certainly follow the generally accepted practices for such things using the international rules for consolidated financial statements. These basically would cause NCSoft to report Paragon Studios (aka NCI) numbers by simply translating them, at the time of the reporting, into Won by either a cost-averaging method (unlikely) or as of report date (most likely).

You could take all of the numbers, look up the exchange rate as of the report date, and probably reverse engineer the actual numbers in US dollars to a very high degree of accuracy. There's almost certainly no other weird strangeness going on in the financials than that.


Frankly, the numbers are what they are. Even with the various sources for margin of error, the three quarter trend eliminates most of them as being anything but secondary modifiers to the general trend. I don't think they are cause for panic as such, but I also don't think the numerical trend is anything but real either.

Going Rogue may reverse that trend, but the important thing will be *how* it reverses that trend. I'm expecting a revenue spike regardless. But I will be looking carefully for substantive changes that persist over the following two quarters.


As to what this says about NCSoft's possible long-term commitment to City of Heroes, I think the cost estimate of about $94,000 (64,000 GBP) per employee is probably a bit high. And its probably the worst kept secret that PS is shuffling people around to work on a parallel development project for NCSoft so its difficult to say how NCSoft cost accounts for Paragon Studios. Having said that I suspect that short of a literal catastrophe, NCSoft would not pull the plug on City of Heroes while they were working on a possible successor MMO. I think there is a real danger of CoX losing critical mass for an MMO (there are those that would probably argue it already has) but I don't think we're there yet.

In my opinion, the biggest problem is that trends are powerful things and difficult to overcome with singular events. No matter how good Going Rogue is, to overcome a subscriber downward trend would, in my opinion, require a sustained counter-trend in content release. We have to be able to get to that target of one significant content release every quarter or so, in my opinion, and if the infrastructure doesn't allow for that, we have to change the infrastructure so that we can.

To be honest, if I was Brian Clayton, that would be my number one skunkworks priority: figure out a way to make tools that free the content developers to release content at least twice as fast as they do now. And I'm fully aware of what I'm saying when I say "twice." I think its entirely within the realm of possibility, but would probably require a special parallel effort to generate.

Originally Posted by Frosty_Femme I said "ur" which is not a word. It's a sound dumb people make when you ask them to spell out "you are".

Human nature and the underlying fallacies on which our modern world runs are all well and good, but don't lose sight of the important point in this: Will our pretendy funtime superhero game still be here for us this time next year?

no doubt.

whu? The 5th have been in an 'instance' since Ouroborus was introduced. Or am I misreading what you're saying?

Depends. Is NCSoft happy with any profit at all, or do they expect perpetual growth in profit. Because companies have and WILL cut divisions... not because they are FAILING, but because they aren't measuring up to the artificial goals that the corporate number crunchers set for them that don't necessarily reflect reality.

That's something I'm dealing with right now in the company I work for, incidentally.

Yes.

Alrighty then:

Two things:

1. It isn't only public companies that have that mentality. In the IT industry of which I have been a player for more than twenty years, *most* of the service companies I've seen have imploded after large bursts in growth, driven completely internally by the notion that expanding the business for the best possible work environment doesn't have the fatal flaw that all other moments in time won't be that optimal.

2. Conversely, public companies are accountable to shareholders, but usually in one of two ways: they are presumed to either be able to make money of which the shareholders get a cut (through shareholder dividends) or they are presumed to take that money and reinvest it in the company which should make the company more valuable (through shareholder capital gains). Both expectations are reasonable for investors. The problem isn't the push to make money, its the time horizons involved. And actually, it is rarely the rank and file shareholders that are pushing these get rich quick metrics, it is the management and the board which are, for their own personal purposes, usually incentivised purposes (hit this mark, get a bonus). And those people would be just as driven in privately held companies.


In fact, of the three major problems with the financial industry, this is one of them. There are many jobs in the financial industry in which you're allowed to take this gamble:

1. 90% chance everything fine, you win 5 million dollars.

2. 10% chance everything goes to hell, you lose your job.

This is an easy choice for a lot of people. The problem is two fold. First, the downside is far too low compared to the upside. In purely quantitative terms this is a good bet to make.

Second: most intelligent people know that's a lie, and the bet is really this:

1. 90% chance everything fine, you win 5 million dollars.

2. 9.999999% chance everything goes to hell, you lose your job, someone else loses a lot more.

3. 0.000001% chance you destroy a larger section of the planet than you have the authority to.

Supposedly intelligent people** round the last one off to zero and tell themselves that #2 has no innocent victims so they can sleep at night. The round-off error in particular is also one of the two root causes of the last financial system collapse (the other one is one statisticians might call the inverse gambler's fallacy).



** People keep calling the people who caused this problem "highly intelligent people" as if this is a given. This is at least somewhat of a lie: there are only two possibilities: these people were smart and took unacceptable risks deliberately, in which case they were evil, or these people did not understand what they were doing, in which case they were idiots. There's no in-between. It took me only a few minutes of research after the meltdown happened to be able to state mathematically what happened to the CDS market. It shouldn't take intelligent financial wizards very much more time than that.

Really, this has to end. Where do you people keep getting the idea that the devs are trying to kill off farming? They added the SUPER SIDEKICKING system for crying out loud. That's the best farming tool I ever saw in any game. And you know what? That's fine, the devs don't care, I don't care. If you can fight groups set for 8 you deserve the rewards for 8.

What the devs ARE cracking down on is exploitive farming in the AE that give far greater reward than what they should according to the risk they pose. And they should. Yes, things with the AE rewards balance have been messy as a result but leaving exploits in a game will do far more damage than fixing them.

Also the idea that people who farmer are the 'many' and the rest are the 'few' is absurd. Yes, it is.

if they didnt we wouldnt have changed sidekicking 3 times to try and stop it.if your old enough here to remember 41 being the minimum lvl to go into a lvl 50 mish and get xp.then to combat that it was 46. now everyone gets to be 49. all to stop or fix farming high lvl xp

If you've been playing the game for as long as you say you have, there is no change the Devs can make that will permanently remedy your problem of being bored with the content. It's ok to stop playing a game and go do something else. We'll be fine. Leveling is just as fast, if not faster, than it ever was, and you can even do it faster soloing than you used to. How is that bad again?

Would the "New Issue every three to four months" mantra they used to tell us be doable in your world, or is that too much to reasonably expect at this point? To me, the previous Issues were coming at us fast and furious because they went after the low-hanging fruit whenever possible. Now they're trying to come up with seldom used or new ideas and they've got to do more ground-up building, which slows the process down, which should be expected.

Well, let me put it this way. I'm not a producer or a scheduler, so I don't know for sure if its possible. What I do know is that if I was in a position to do so, I would do everything in my power to make it possible.

The difference is, of course, I might fail. But it wouldn't be for lack of trying.

...Marry me.

Hey! Screw you too, Wes
I commented on it. I didn't say much, but whatever... I can see who skips over my posts now...





*puts paper bag back on head*

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

I infer from some of her other posts that she's pretty well-off.