cox 2010 3rd quarter earnings

Numbers don't lie, but numbers don't talk. You need to interpret them, and it's in these interpretations that falsehoods arise. NCsoft don't release all of their pertinent numbers, and even the ones they do release get misinterpreted to mean something completely different more often than not. That's why I rarely pay too much heed to these threads.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Or it could mean about the same amount of people are paying subscriptions, but more of them are in-game more often.

Most people would have said that about the banks pre-2008

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

It was about 10 years from loosening of the rules to crash.

I happily send them money on a regular basis.

Those were the pre-purchases. I am not sure when they recognized those but I don't think there were that many of us compared to the pre-orders which became sales when it released.

Tabula Rasa implosion. Richard Garriot buy-out.

It is the east, and Juliet is a fire blaster.
Arise, fair fire blaster, and kill the envious corruptor,
Who is already sick and pale with nerfs,
That thou her hero art far more leet than she.

@SpaceNut - My 50s, AE arcs and current projects at ParagonWiki

...I forgot what experience means.

Always possible, but might not be probable. While back, the servers used to go yellow around 1400 +/- 150 unhidden and red around 2800 +/- 200...with the i18 build, i see it go yellow around 200 +/- 30 and red around 1000 +/- 75.

After NCSoft stopped publishing their server access numbers i can no longer extrapolate the hidden players to confirm, so i suppose it's possible at i18's launch there was a flood of hidden players that outnumber the unhidden ones by 7 to 1 for yellow, however historically that hasn't been the case.

EDIT:
I don't know about game builds in relation to server load, but anyone know if it's possible the GR build causes more load per player than previous builds?

Same. My mental image was it was much more important

Its really, really hard to say. The range of possibilities is anything from Going Rogue doubling the subscriber base to growing it by exactly zero (and I mean *literally* exactly zero by calculations).

I've only just had time tonight to look at Q3 and think about the numbers. Its unfortunately something I don't want to post calculations on until I've had some time to think about and analyze further, because any calculations I release now would be alarmist. A trivial calculation I can imagine someone doing on the back of an envelope would actually show zero subscriber gain: just every existing subscriber buying GR, and no one else. That would be bad.

But this is much more complicated than it seems. For one thing, I'm thinking about realized revenue. Consider this: suppose someone bought the boxed edition from a retail outlet, and not the NCSoft store directly. Typical mark up for a game is like 50%, very roughly, so lets go with that. So when someone buys a $29.99 copy of GR from a store, we might expect NCSoft to get about $15 of revenue from that sale.

The catch: GR comes with a free month. Subscription revenue is, to the best of my knowledge, realized as it is earned, which means even if I pay for a year in advance, my revenue is prorated across the year I'm subscribed. So logically, if I were to buy the GR boxed set and apply the code, I would get a free month, which means the $12-$15 that NCSoft *would* have realized from me would be deferred to next month. So they realize $15 from my purchase of GR, but lose about $15 of revenue they would have realized from my subscriptions, which makes that sale revenue neutral on the books on an accrual basis. In other words, I actually added nothing to the bottom line. Or maybe only a buck or two. At least, that's what I think is likely to happen, given the few minutes of thought I've been able to put to it.

That makes the ratio of people who purchased from the NCSoft store verses people who purchased from retail outlets potentially critical to properly interpreting Q3. Or we can all wait for Q4, when this uncertainty will probably resolve itself.

It might not be until the weekend when I've had a chance to really think about what the numbers are saying. At the moment all we know is NCSoft made a bunch of money on Going Rogue. Whether they made it on existing subscribers or grew the subscriber base substantially the numbers currently aren't saying clearly yet.

I get the revenue-neutral argument, but there's also no denying we've seen a lot of new players in the game (I look at people's badges and have seen many who have zero Vet badges) and the servers are much more active than they were over the summer. At this point, some of those people who purchased GR must be subscribing past their free month, because it beggars belief we'd have an exact exchange of a new group of people buying GR just as the previous group let their accounts lapse after the first month in order to maintain the server loads.

Granted, the servers aren't *as* full as in September and October, but they still seem far more populated than the entire rest of the year. I can't even recall the last time I saw Virtue and Freedom constantly red for weeks on end. Usually it's just during 2xp weekends and free reactivation weekends.

All to say I think NCSoft made *some* money from GR.

There's no denying it, but at the moment there's also no quantifying it. Such anecdotal observations have been used in the past to amake all sorts of positive and negative projections of subscriber numbers that subsequent data proved wildly incorrect.


My point was that I can foresee an accounting scenario whereby new customers, who might statistically be more likely to be retail customers, might actually be invisible to the Q3 numbers. Which means, barring a more sophisticated analysis, we could have anything from a hundred new subs to a hundred *thousand* new subs, and the Q3 numbers would be almost exactly the same. Which makes it dangerous to extrapolate Q3 without careful thought. I'm currently trying to think about whether there even exists an actual analysis methodology that might expose subscriber information better.

It's clear that the Party Pack has saved Paragon (and NcSOFT!) after that whole Going Rogue fiasco and forcing subscribers to choose between only 2 product SKUs..... ( ' ;

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

Times like these makes me wish they still published subscriber numbers.

There are three types of lies:

1. Lies
2. Damned Lies
3. Statistics

They published sub. numbers?

Yeah, it is tough to get a good sense of what Q3 really means at this point. I also find it odd because the player population seems to be at its highest in almost 3 years but the Q3 numbers don't necessarily say that. Odd.

Ya gotta remember that anyone new who bought GR got a free month of game time most likely, so the subscriptions may not be shown in the numbers yet. It all depends on how they run their accounting.

That just means trying to find a hard relationship between subscriber numbers and sales per quarter "fuzzy" at best.

We don't know how they do their accounting for instance. Do they credit a multi-month subscription the quarter it's bought or do they spread it out over the subscription period? Did they change their accounting method from when the game first came out until now? Did they change it when they bought the IP and founded Paragon? What's the sell through rate for the add on packs?

Then GR was a strange beast. We had online pre-purchase going on since late 1st quarter and the store box mid third quarter along with the online extras pack for those who pre-purchased. At the very least it's the reason we didn't get an distinctive sales spike like we saw when CoV was released.

Well to see if or how much of a spike, we'll need to see the corresponding decrease to its increase, which means have to wait till 4Q.

But if you're comparing the leading edge of the spike from CoV's launch and GR's then not sure what you mean by a lack of a distinctive jump in sales. The quarter CoV launched (4Q 2005) saw around a 44% increase before it and almost a corresponding decrease after.

GR so far we see around a 62% increase from previous. If 4Q sees a drop close to that percentage, i'd say that's more of a distinctive spike than CoV. Sure the exact amount differs a great deal but that's likely because we have fewer subcribers now.


*Ignore the percentages in this post, they were made by a crazy person with a demented calculator. Yep, it's the calculator's fault...that's right.