Resume Blaming GW2

Yea yea, I'm going to be a bit of a troll here... but a troll with a point!!!

Back in 2009, NCSoft West laidoff quite a few people.

This sparked some rumors in various sites, among them Kotaku, about a potential delay on Guild Wars 2. It seems that the ArenaNet team felt inclined to dismiss the rumor that this was hurting Guild Wars development by... well... taking in the blame:

Quote:

You've all seen announcements about restructuring at NCsoft West, and it's natural to wonder whether that restructuring impacts ArenaNet's Guild Wars 2 development. In fact, the reason NCsoft West is restructuring itself is so that the company can put all of its focus into its top-tier games like Guild Wars 2. Our team continues to grow, and has the strong support and financial backing we need to achieve our goal of making Guild Wars 2 the best online role-playing game ever created.

Although the wording is different, it still is the same message kotaku got for the closure of Paragon Studios "realignment of company focus and publishing support".

In other words: resources [ie: budget, not staff] used on CoH will be channeled to offer stronger support and financial backing to top-tier games (I assume still within NCSoft West. What is in NCSoft West? As far as I understand, they undertake the development efforts behind Guild Wars and localization efforts behind Aion, Lineage and Lineage 2.

Now, to be fair, in Oct 7, 2010 there were layoffs specifically within Paragon Studios, with this press release:

Quote:

In an effort to put a greater focus on the City of Heroes franchise, Paragon Studios is shifting resources within the studio. In order to optimize the refocus, there has been a reduction in force that has impacted a small amount of people. Paragon Studios is an integral part of the NCsoft West family and will continue to prosper, delivering the world’s most popular superpowered hero MMO game, City of Heroes, to fans around the world.

Here they say only that the resources got shifted within the studio. Unless they hired more people after they fired some... (perhaps to work on the other secret game) there is little logic here. The studio would just be working on less manpower and spending less on payroll. Perhaps that extra relocation went into financing a third party handling the F2P market transactions, but I still doubt it. Been trying to find any more on what may have happened in NCSoft West at the time, perhaps hiring efforts, but my google-fu is not THAT good.

Now, one thing I did noticed, just 7 days before this announcement, ArenaNet started a headhunt for employees.

Only 16 positions are listed at their job site now, but also got to keep in mind that also NCSoft blamed labor costs for its losses due to "restructuring" in the past quarter.

What restructuring? Perhaps the aquisition of Ntreev for $96.7 million back in February. I’m sure that came with a lot of employees and forced restructuring.

OK… I lost focus here… hey there is a reason why I’m not a New York Times reporter!

So yea, I don’t really have a lot of traces back to GW2 other than that first one in 2009. I was just not able to resist the trollish title. But it does seems that “publishing support” is NCSoft’s way of saying “taking budget away from one studio and giving that budget to another studio.” It just makes sense it may had been ArenaNet at this point, usually moving money overseas is hard so it’s more likely money budgeted to one US studio will be directed to another US studio. I highly doubt they will sink that money into Lineage or Aion translation efforts.

It’s very likely Paragon Studios died so they were able to relocate more resources into GW2.

Edit to add: remember if you play Guild Wars 2: Every time you earn XP in that game, you are drinking the blood of thousands of dead incarnate heroes and villains. Maybe.

Parsing corporate speak is a fool's errand. Don't put too much thought into it.

I think NCSoft is putting funding into GW2 that was meant for COH. I think thats why they did it so abruptly. If they waited and went out in a nice way it wouldn't benefit their cash cow.

Good for business...bad for us.

Well...it will be interesting to see how many ex-Paragoners wind up at ArenaNet then.

Even though it has no sub, I had little interest in ArenaNet's fantasy-based box-collecting game. I have less interest now.

It's a reasonably persuasive argument you're making, and I don't doubt that if NCsoft decided that they'd get a better return on money invested in GW2 rather than in CoH that's what they'd do. Business is business, and all that.

I'm not quite ready to burn NCSoft in effigy (or GW2, by association.) For me it will all come down to one thing: if a serious offer is made for CoH by another investor and NCsoft come to an agreement all (perhaps almost all) will be forgiven. If a serious offer is made and NCsoft decide they'd rather just sit on the IP and let it rot then I will never touch them, or anything to do with them, ever again.

There was also a big layoff (approx 400 employees) in June, shortly after Nexon bought a large share of NCSoft. The severance from that layoff is one of the reasons that they posted a loss for Q2.

It seems that that's about when the "restructuring" really started ramping up.

Considering how much time and effort they've put into developing GW2 (how many years ago was it originally supposed to be out now?), I think it's a pretty safe assumption that the Paragon Studios layoffs are in some way connected to it. It may not be a direct correlation, but that almost certainly played a part.

*sighs* Really, Starsman? :-/

Summary of the OP: I made up a bunch of crap so that I could be snarky about making a different game the scapegoat for the fact that NCSoft no longer found COH a good investment, and created another thread to do it in because the first thread was getting way too reasonable and friendly.

You win, bro. I'm out.

Um. Guild Wars 2 is a buy to play cash shop that just released.

Or to put it this way: What other massive quantity of resources does GW2 freakin' need right now?

I've had half a mind to articulate the rather bleak fifty thousand foot view of NCSoft and the American MMO industry itself, but emotions are still raw and I want to spend my free time enjoying CoH and GW2.

I'll just say there's no one singular reason why NCSoft did what it did.

I like to present the facts and nothing but. What kind of person would take the side opposite that kitten and baby ducks!

Guild Wars generated $15 million (US dollars) more revenue in a year's less time than CoH.

While our game used their money to crank out free content upgrades, ArenaNet used the money to develop the GW1 expansions (which kept the money coming in) and GW2.

November 2010's NCSoft's investor presentation had revenue projections of 700 Billion KrW for 2010, 850 Billion KrW for 2011 and 1 Trillion KrW for 2012. They only hit 656 Billion in 2010 and 609 Billion in 2011. They expected Aion to continue it's explosive growth and Blade and Soul and Guild Wars 2 to come out in 2011. It's the kind of fairy tail revenue projections that management make in every company that reality can rarely if ever deliver on which then gives management the excuse to restructure to make investors happy.

North American and EU region revenues have been shrinking since FY 2009, down 60% in 2011 from 2009 numbers. Guild Wars 2 will probably give it a nice kick in the pants for the rest of this year. They already pulled Lineage I out of NA due to lack of acceptable subscription revenue in their eyes.

As an intelligent human being you would normally choose the known commodity because you know what you will get and won't end up with nothing.

But Corporate leaders are not intelligent human beings. They are ultimately SALESMEN. Their entire goal is to make people think their company is worth as much as possible. It is hard to sell a known commodity as growing 20% next quarter when everyone knows it's been around 8 years and isn't likely to go anywhere.

So instead they push a new project saying it will earn much more than the old one, even though they have absolutely no proof of this. Look at all the failed MMOs in the last 8 years, every one of them had corporate supporters telling people how much money they were going to make off of it. You are buying a pig-in-a-poke.

Corporate leaders have to justify their salaries by showing they were responsible for doing something, usually lots of realignments that accomplish nothing except irritating the employees. Their other options are Firing a lot of people, Buying another company (even though most of the time that makes no sense, if stockholders wanted to own that company they would have invested in it) or closing down profitable lines which have no way to grow (stock holders expect to make more money for their dollar each year, another fallacy).