The hundred million figure would include what it cost NcSoft to buy the Garriot Brand Name in the first place, which would explain how they ended up with 6% of NcSoft stock. Then factor in the development of two versions of Tabula Rasa. Auto Assault was a writeoff of almost $15 million dollars, and it took very little time to develop. It surprised me when they shut AA down. The NA execs talked of having a "stable" of niche games along with the blockbusters that people could pay a monthly fee to play them all...
Until you spread your wings, you have no idea how far you can walk.
He didn't just show up and suck NCSoft dry ROFL which is how this thread makes it sound.
The Cult of Richard remains alive and well.
Are you aware that the guy has made several month-long trips to Antarctica? Safaris to Africa and Nicaraguq and weeks arranging submarine rides? Did you know how much time he's devoted to his pet boxer "Jesus Chavez" and arranged his legal help and trained with him and went to his boxing matches all over the country and into Mexico? Do you know how many months a year he devotes to his alternate vocation, Space Adventures? He takes a zero-gravity ride about once a month, it seems. He's all over the world reminding people that his dad is an ex-astronaut and that he must, he must, go into space. He's often in Russia arranging for yet another Mig ride or negotiating for his big Shuttle trip. Every year he takes part in Mardi Gras in New Orleans on a "crewe" as they call them for the parades.
He gives lavish entertainments where he is the star of his own show, performing in plays in his own private theater. He's been taking magic-trick lessons and is on his way to being a semi-pro illusionist.
He lives the coolest life. Everybody loves to imagine that they could live one like him. But no one ever asks him the Big Question....When do you have time to produce games? because that would spoil the illusion...
Until you spread your wings, you have no idea how far you can walk.
Do you have any sales # sources as to the "TR saving NcSoft's but" speculation? All I have to work with is having followed Amazon sales numbers for the past two weeks. If you have more, I'd love to see it. Since you play the game, do you know the number of subscribers? Also, the quarterly sales report out this week was pretty dismal. You'd think that a huge sale in preorders would have given at least a little mo.
Are you aware that at some point the Garriott brothers owned 6% of NcSoft (not NA, the whole company)--this number is in the Yahoo company profile. Whether they have sold this asset, or are still hanging onto it, I do not know. This is also what NcSoft may lose--not just the forty-plus million and six-seven years that it cost them to develop TWO TR games, but the hit when this stock or stock option is sold--if it hasn't already been sold. NcSoft won't go under if worst comes to worst. It MIGHT get bought out by a "white knight" like SOE or EA. Wouldn't it be ironic if EA bought them out? You may not remember, but when Origin Systems was floundering and dying, EA rescued the brothers and made them rich.
Would be very interested to see all of the above sales numbers and subs for TR please.
Did you know that Richard Garriot was the producer on Lineage in 1998?
Any chance you can back this up with a link? Because I'm doubting this claim.....
It's actually true... And I think Lineage 2 aswell, but who knows I could be wrong.
This is just what I've heard and read somewhere too (Long time, cant find a link now...)
That was Robbert garriot, Richard Garriot's brother.
If you do some research, you will discover that Richard Garriot was Executive producer on both Linage and many others.
I believe he was executive producer for the english language versions (as he was based in NA) - which didn't do extraordinary well. I find it hard to believe that the Lineage games had anything but Korean producers for the korean language version.
Edit: And sure.. its a serious profit problem, this whole TR thing, but its faaaar from a survival problem. $240 millions in annual sales. $100 to TR. That's less than half they sell for every year (other costs, yes, but not enough to turn it around). I think what one can say is that the profits (as in surplus income) are getting lower. Not much more.
Hey im only saying if you aint played it, dont speculate on it. Amazon stats? Are you kidding me, you see i played L2 for 3 years and quit the bot infested, farmer driven game. I hope your still enjoying your self, the screwed up economy makes you have to buy adena, and if you say you never baught adena "your lieing". So yes i can comment on L2 and call it trashy because i played the damn game for 3 years. Any game where you have spend more money beyond the monthly fee in order to remain competetive in the game aint worth playing. That alone should be enough to call it quits, and that says alot of things about that game.
Come play TR and then make your comments, all this yeah ummmm i think TR is going to fail. Based on? Because ummm i said so is crap...thats BS. That goes for all the people here who have just come out of no where and said "oh yeah ummm i agree, TR will definately fail" chumps.
Any how enjoy your dead, Bot/Farmer driven game lineage 2, dont be upset because you cant use Walker in TR. Im done here.
______________________________ Currently Playing: Tabula Rasa Waiting to play: Aion Games played: Lineage, Lineage 2, WoW, Guild Wars, City of Heroes, Archlord, Espa Grenada ______________________________ System Specs: Windows Vista Home Premium (x64) AMD X2 5200 (OC-2.8ghz) 4gb Corsair XMS2 ddr2-800 mem. Crossfire 2 x (ATI 2600xt HD)
NCSoft never has a fan base because they pride themselves on business model, meaning they treat it as a business and worry about the amount of boxes they sell rather than creating a solid fan base such as Blizzard has.
NCSoft makes too many mmo games.COV,COH,TR,Lineage series,TR,Guild Wars,Dungeon Runners and Aion is coming soon. All their games compete with one another and never allowing one game to flourish and create a solid fan base. They think quantity not quality. Unless they have something up their sleeve, Guild Wars 2 and Aion will be their last chance to actually make a difference in gaming and the mmo market. Stop mass producing average mmo games and take your time to make a great mmo game please ?
NCSoft never has a fan base because they pride themselves on business model, meaning they treat it as a business and worry about the amount of boxes they sell rather than creating a solid fan base such as Blizzard has. NCSoft makes too many mmo games.COV,COH,TR,Lineage series,TR,Guild Wars,Dungeon Runners and Aion is coming soon. All their games compete with one another and never allowing one game to flourish and create a solid fan base. They think quantity not quality. Unless they have something up their sleeve, Guild Wars 2 and Aion will be their last chance to actually make a difference in gaming and the mmo market. Stop mass producing average mmo games and take your time to make a great mmo game please ?
To be fair, they publish many of those games... they don't develop them themselves.
And that said, the games you listed there really aren't direct competitors with each other...
L2 is nothing like TR is nothing like CoH/CoV is nothing like Dungeon Runners is nothing like GW... you get the idea. Someone who hates "high fantasy" but loves comic books is going to play CoV/CoH before they'd pick up L2. Someone who likes high fantasy but is more interested in a quick "pick up and play" type game than a long slow grind is going to play Dungeon Runners or perhaps GW before they play L2.
I think SoE having EQ2 *and* Vanguard - two games cut from the same type of cloth - is a better example of what you're talking about. It's one hig-fantasy game competing against another (popularity of either notwithstanding)
For those created by NC themselves, like L2, there are individual development teams working on them. Aside from perhaps moving people from one project to another as necessary (not at all unusual in the game dev world), what one is doing has no direct impact on the other.
Aion might have some things in common with L2, being, seemingly, from a similar mold; but seems there will be enough differences to make it stand out overall.
As for quality over quantity... I think that's subjective. I think GW is a solid game, as is CoV/CoH - they each have healthy fan-bases, etc. Dungeon Runners is basically unabashed hack-n-slash, but it certainly has its own crowd. TR remains to be seen, as does Aion. But really, since NCSoft is serving to handle publishing of these games and not development directly, the "quality" of the games themselves isn't entirely in their hands.
"If you just step away for a sec you will clearly see all the pot holes in the road, and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
NCSoft never has a fan base because they pride themselves on business model, meaning they treat it as a business and worry about the amount of boxes they sell rather than creating a solid fan base such as Blizzard has. NCSoft makes too many mmo games.COV,COH,TR,Lineage series,TR,Guild Wars,Dungeon Runners and Aion is coming soon. All their games compete with one another and never allowing one game to flourish and create a solid fan base. They think quantity not quality. Unless they have something up their sleeve, Guild Wars 2 and Aion will be their last chance to actually make a difference in gaming and the mmo market. Stop mass producing average mmo games and take your time to make a great mmo game please ?
To be fair, they publish many of those games... they don't develop them themselves.
And that said, the games you listed there really aren't direct competitors with each other...
L2 is nothing like TR is nothing like CoH/CoV is nothing like Dungeon Runners is nothing like GW... you get the idea. Someone who hates "high fantasy" but loves comic books is going to play CoV/CoH before they'd pick up L2. Someone who likes high fantasy but is more interested in a quick "pick up and play" type game than a long slow grind is going to play Dungeon Runners or perhaps GW before they play L2.
I think SoE having EQ2 *and* Vanguard - two games cut from the same type of cloth - is a better example of what you're talking about. It's one hig-fantasy game competing against another (popularity of either notwithstanding)
For those created by NC themselves, like L2, there are individual development teams working on them. Aside from perhaps moving people from one project to another as necessary (not at all unusual in the game dev world), what one is doing has no direct impact on the other.
Aion might have some things in common with L2, being, seemingly, from a similar mold; but seems there will be enough differences to make it stand out overall.
As for quality over quantity... I think that's subjective. I think GW is a solid game, as is CoV/CoH - they each have healthy fan-bases, etc. Dungeon Runners is basically unabashed hack-n-slash, but it certainly has its own crowd. TR remains to be seen, as does Aion. But really, since NCSoft is serving to handle publishing of these games and not development directly, the "quality" of the games themselves isn't entirely in their hands.
I do agree that the games I listed are diferent in gameplay styles but they are still listed as a mmo products. They need to let their mmo games mature and grow a fanbase before they keep pumping out mmo games because they compete with one another within the company. Basically it is like that old saying, your're taking from Peter to pay Paul and never see a major increase of fans playing their games. In my opinion if they want to stay successful they need to branch out in other areas such as FPS and RTS games. Though I do believe that AIon will save them luckily. People keep talking about AOC and WAR but Aion will be more successful than both.
They should takes lessons from Blizzard. Blizzard over the years grew a nice size fanbase with great games such as Starcraft and Warcraft. Then they hit their fans with WOW and well look at them now, 6 million plus subs playing their game. You can't say that about any of NCSoft games,though Lineage 2 seems to have a nice showing of players in their game but it still doesn't come close as to what Blizzard has accomplished. NCSoft can only hope that Aion and Guild Wars 2 has great success. I'm not really a major fan of Blizzard but its hard not to notice how successful they are compared to everyone else.
NCSoft never has a fan base because they pride themselves on business model, meaning they treat it as a business and worry about the amount of boxes they sell rather than creating a solid fan base such as Blizzard has. NCSoft makes too many mmo games.COV,COH,TR,Lineage series,TR,Guild Wars,Dungeon Runners and Aion is coming soon. All their games compete with one another and never allowing one game to flourish and create a solid fan base. They think quantity not quality. Unless they have something up their sleeve, Guild Wars 2 and Aion will be their last chance to actually make a difference in gaming and the mmo market. Stop mass producing average mmo games and take your time to make a great mmo game please ?
To be fair, they publish many of those games... they don't develop them themselves.
And that said, the games you listed there really aren't direct competitors with each other...
L2 is nothing like TR is nothing like CoH/CoV is nothing like Dungeon Runners is nothing like GW... you get the idea. Someone who hates "high fantasy" but loves comic books is going to play CoV/CoH before they'd pick up L2. Someone who likes high fantasy but is more interested in a quick "pick up and play" type game than a long slow grind is going to play Dungeon Runners or perhaps GW before they play L2.
I think SoE having EQ2 *and* Vanguard - two games cut from the same type of cloth - is a better example of what you're talking about. It's one hig-fantasy game competing against another (popularity of either notwithstanding)
For those created by NC themselves, like L2, there are individual development teams working on them. Aside from perhaps moving people from one project to another as necessary (not at all unusual in the game dev world), what one is doing has no direct impact on the other.
Aion might have some things in common with L2, being, seemingly, from a similar mold; but seems there will be enough differences to make it stand out overall.
As for quality over quantity... I think that's subjective. I think GW is a solid game, as is CoV/CoH - they each have healthy fan-bases, etc. Dungeon Runners is basically unabashed hack-n-slash, but it certainly has its own crowd. TR remains to be seen, as does Aion. But really, since NCSoft is serving to handle publishing of these games and not development directly, the "quality" of the games themselves isn't entirely in their hands.
I do agree that the games I listed are diferent in gameplay styles but they are still listed as a mmo products. They need to let their mmo games mature and grow a fanbase before they keep pumping out mmo games because they compete with one another within the company. Basically it is like that old saying, your're taking from Peter to pay Paul and never see a major increase of fans playing their games. In my opinion if they want to stay successful they need to branch out in other areas such as FPS and RTS games. Though I do believe that AIon will save them luckily. People keep talking about AOC and WAR but Aion will be more successful than both.
Hmm, I don't think that's necessarily true. Again, the games are different in style and setting. As I illustrated above, people who don't like superheroes/villains are not likely to play something like CoV/CoH anyway. Similarly, people who don't enjoy your "Korean-style Grind" games aren't going to play L2. There's a whole lot more MMOs out there than just what NCSoft has and yet all those games have some degree of player-base, despite the existence of others. In other words, they're not necessarily robbing Peter to play Paul as even in the absence of one game, they're not necessarily going to be playing the other. If CoV/CoH weren't around, that doesn't mean they'd automatically be playing GW, or any other NCSoft game for that matter. They might go off and play a MMO published by a different company altogether.
So, having variety in the different types of games they publish actually benefits them, they're providing more variety and potentially getting more overall business than they would with only a few different games. NCSoft is doing what publishing companies do - they bring a number of different products under their umbrella.
They obviously have a minimum standard of how they expect their games to perform, seeing as how they've decided to discontinue AutoAssault. So, I don't think they're just wildly picking up and clutching on to any MMO that comes their way. SOE could be said to be doing that - they're sitting on games that are, relatively speaking, ghost towns.
What you're suggesting would be like a book publisher only working with 1 or 2 authors who work in a specific genre. Well, there's only so much a single author can produce, so by doing that, they're limiting themselves and their potential reader-base. If one author writes romantic novels and one writes historical fiction, well now they're missing out on all the readers who might not like either of those genres, but would pick up some fantasy, or horror, or sci-fi, or crime novels, and so forth, in a moment. Cast a bigger net, you catch more fish.
Keep in mind, NCSoft acts as the publisher with most of their games. They oversee the development, set milestones and pay out checks to keep the developer going based on meeting those milestones. They then handle the publishing and, perhaps, distribution of a title, etc. They don't need a team the size of a typical dev team (esp. for a MMO) to do this.
Also, you're depicting the situation almost as though none of their games are doing well. L2 has something like 16 million players world-wide. Guildwars is very successful. CoV/CoH is successful, and so forth.
They should takes lessons from Blizzard. Blizzard over the years grew a nice size fanbase with great games such as Starcraft and Warcraft. Then they hit their fans with WOW and well look at them now, 6 million plus subs playing their game. You can't say that about any of NCSoft games,though Lineage 2 seems to have a nice showing of players in their game but it still doesn't come close as to what Blizzard has accomplished. NCSoft can only hope that Aion and Guild Wars 2 has great success. I'm not really a major fan of Blizzard but its hard not to notice how successful they are compared to everyone else.
NCSoft has done similarly, with Lineage and Lineage 2. The Lineage series is NCSoft's own IP, like Warcraft is Blizzard's. That said, L2 has more players worldwide than WoW does. It just so happens that where Blizzard sticks to their own titles, NCSoft branches out to publish others as well.
There's nothing wrong in what Blizzard is doing because, yes, they're a very popular Name with some great titles. They seem to have a degree of autonomy, like ID Software that, I would think, is quite enviable in the industry. However, there's nothing wrong in what NCSoft is doing either.
"If you just step away for a sec you will clearly see all the pot holes in the road, and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
Comments
Until you spread your wings, you have no idea how far you can walk.
The Cult of Richard remains alive and well.
Are you aware that the guy has made several month-long trips to Antarctica? Safaris to Africa and Nicaraguq and weeks arranging submarine rides? Did you know how much time he's devoted to his pet boxer "Jesus Chavez" and arranged his legal help and trained with him and went to his boxing matches all over the country and into Mexico? Do you know how many months a year he devotes to his alternate vocation, Space Adventures? He takes a zero-gravity ride about once a month, it seems. He's all over the world reminding people that his dad is an ex-astronaut and that he must, he must, go into space. He's often in Russia arranging for yet another Mig ride or negotiating for his big Shuttle trip. Every year he takes part in Mardi Gras in New Orleans on a "crewe" as they call them for the parades.
He gives lavish entertainments where he is the star of his own show, performing in plays in his own private theater. He's been taking magic-trick lessons and is on his way to being a semi-pro illusionist.
He lives the coolest life. Everybody loves to imagine that they could live one like him. But no one ever asks him the Big Question....When do you have time to produce games? because that would spoil the illusion...
Until you spread your wings, you have no idea how far you can walk.
Any chance you can back this up with a link? Because I'm doubting this claim.....
It's actually true... And I think Lineage 2 aswell, but who knows I could be wrong.
This is just what I've heard and read somewhere too (Long time, cant find a link now...)
That was Robbert garriot, Richard Garriot's brother.
If you do some research, you will discover that Richard Garriot was Executive producer on both Linage and many others.
Get a life you freaking Gamer.....no no, you don't understand, I'm a Gamer, I have many lives!!
Any chance you can back this up with a link? Because I'm doubting this claim.....
It's actually true... And I think Lineage 2 aswell, but who knows I could be wrong.
This is just what I've heard and read somewhere too (Long time, cant find a link now...)
That was Robbert garriot, Richard Garriot's brother.
If you do some research, you will discover that Richard Garriot was Executive producer on both Linage and many others.
I believe he was executive producer for the english language versions (as he was based in NA) - which didn't do extraordinary well. I find it hard to believe that the Lineage games had anything but Korean producers for the korean language version.
Edit: And sure.. its a serious profit problem, this whole TR thing, but its faaaar from a survival problem. $240 millions in annual sales. $100 to TR. That's less than half they sell for every year (other costs, yes, but not enough to turn it around). I think what one can say is that the profits (as in surplus income) are getting lower. Not much more.
Heres hoping for Aion!
Hey im only saying if you aint played it, dont speculate on it. Amazon stats? Are you kidding me, you see i played L2 for 3 years and quit the bot infested, farmer driven game. I hope your still enjoying your self, the screwed up economy makes you have to buy adena, and if you say you never baught adena "your lieing". So yes i can comment on L2 and call it trashy because i played the damn game for 3 years. Any game where you have spend more money beyond the monthly fee in order to remain competetive in the game aint worth playing. That alone should be enough to call it quits, and that says alot of things about that game.
Come play TR and then make your comments, all this yeah ummmm i think TR is going to fail. Based on? Because ummm i said so is crap...thats BS. That goes for all the people here who have just come out of no where and said "oh yeah ummm i agree, TR will definately fail" chumps.
Any how enjoy your dead, Bot/Farmer driven game lineage 2, dont be upset because you cant use Walker in TR. Im done here.
______________________________
Currently Playing: Tabula Rasa
Waiting to play: Aion
Games played: Lineage, Lineage 2, WoW, Guild Wars, City of Heroes, Archlord, Espa Grenada
______________________________
System Specs: Windows Vista Home Premium (x64)
AMD X2 5200 (OC-2.8ghz)
4gb Corsair XMS2 ddr2-800 mem.
Crossfire 2 x (ATI 2600xt HD)
don't worry jermell, I'm sure TR will be a half dead bot/ebay driven MMO soon too!
NCSoft never has a fan base because they pride themselves on business model, meaning they treat it as a business and worry about the amount of boxes they sell rather than creating a solid fan base such as Blizzard has.
NCSoft makes too many mmo games.COV,COH,TR,Lineage series,TR,Guild Wars,Dungeon Runners and Aion is coming soon. All their games compete with one another and never allowing one game to flourish and create a solid fan base. They think quantity not quality. Unless they have something up their sleeve, Guild Wars 2 and Aion will be their last chance to actually make a difference in gaming and the mmo market. Stop mass producing average mmo games and take your time to make a great mmo game please ?
To be fair, they publish many of those games... they don't develop them themselves.
And that said, the games you listed there really aren't direct competitors with each other...
L2 is nothing like TR is nothing like CoH/CoV is nothing like Dungeon Runners is nothing like GW... you get the idea. Someone who hates "high fantasy" but loves comic books is going to play CoV/CoH before they'd pick up L2. Someone who likes high fantasy but is more interested in a quick "pick up and play" type game than a long slow grind is going to play Dungeon Runners or perhaps GW before they play L2.
I think SoE having EQ2 *and* Vanguard - two games cut from the same type of cloth - is a better example of what you're talking about. It's one hig-fantasy game competing against another (popularity of either notwithstanding)
For those created by NC themselves, like L2, there are individual development teams working on them. Aside from perhaps moving people from one project to another as necessary (not at all unusual in the game dev world), what one is doing has no direct impact on the other.
Aion might have some things in common with L2, being, seemingly, from a similar mold; but seems there will be enough differences to make it stand out overall.
As for quality over quantity... I think that's subjective. I think GW is a solid game, as is CoV/CoH - they each have healthy fan-bases, etc. Dungeon Runners is basically unabashed hack-n-slash, but it certainly has its own crowd. TR remains to be seen, as does Aion. But really, since NCSoft is serving to handle publishing of these games and not development directly, the "quality" of the games themselves isn't entirely in their hands.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
To be fair, they publish many of those games... they don't develop them themselves.
And that said, the games you listed there really aren't direct competitors with each other...
L2 is nothing like TR is nothing like CoH/CoV is nothing like Dungeon Runners is nothing like GW... you get the idea. Someone who hates "high fantasy" but loves comic books is going to play CoV/CoH before they'd pick up L2. Someone who likes high fantasy but is more interested in a quick "pick up and play" type game than a long slow grind is going to play Dungeon Runners or perhaps GW before they play L2.
I think SoE having EQ2 *and* Vanguard - two games cut from the same type of cloth - is a better example of what you're talking about. It's one hig-fantasy game competing against another (popularity of either notwithstanding)
For those created by NC themselves, like L2, there are individual development teams working on them. Aside from perhaps moving people from one project to another as necessary (not at all unusual in the game dev world), what one is doing has no direct impact on the other.
Aion might have some things in common with L2, being, seemingly, from a similar mold; but seems there will be enough differences to make it stand out overall.
As for quality over quantity... I think that's subjective. I think GW is a solid game, as is CoV/CoH - they each have healthy fan-bases, etc. Dungeon Runners is basically unabashed hack-n-slash, but it certainly has its own crowd. TR remains to be seen, as does Aion. But really, since NCSoft is serving to handle publishing of these games and not development directly, the "quality" of the games themselves isn't entirely in their hands.
I do agree that the games I listed are diferent in gameplay styles but they are still listed as a mmo products. They need to let their mmo games mature and grow a fanbase before they keep pumping out mmo games because they compete with one another within the company. Basically it is like that old saying, your're taking from Peter to pay Paul and never see a major increase of fans playing their games. In my opinion if they want to stay successful they need to branch out in other areas such as FPS and RTS games. Though I do believe that AIon will save them luckily. People keep talking about AOC and WAR but Aion will be more successful than both.
They should takes lessons from Blizzard. Blizzard over the years grew a nice size fanbase with great games such as Starcraft and Warcraft. Then they hit their fans with WOW and well look at them now, 6 million plus subs playing their game. You can't say that about any of NCSoft games,though Lineage 2 seems to have a nice showing of players in their game but it still doesn't come close as to what Blizzard has accomplished. NCSoft can only hope that Aion and Guild Wars 2 has great success. I'm not really a major fan of Blizzard but its hard not to notice how successful they are compared to everyone else.
To be fair, they publish many of those games... they don't develop them themselves.
And that said, the games you listed there really aren't direct competitors with each other...
L2 is nothing like TR is nothing like CoH/CoV is nothing like Dungeon Runners is nothing like GW... you get the idea. Someone who hates "high fantasy" but loves comic books is going to play CoV/CoH before they'd pick up L2. Someone who likes high fantasy but is more interested in a quick "pick up and play" type game than a long slow grind is going to play Dungeon Runners or perhaps GW before they play L2.
I think SoE having EQ2 *and* Vanguard - two games cut from the same type of cloth - is a better example of what you're talking about. It's one hig-fantasy game competing against another (popularity of either notwithstanding)
For those created by NC themselves, like L2, there are individual development teams working on them. Aside from perhaps moving people from one project to another as necessary (not at all unusual in the game dev world), what one is doing has no direct impact on the other.
Aion might have some things in common with L2, being, seemingly, from a similar mold; but seems there will be enough differences to make it stand out overall.
As for quality over quantity... I think that's subjective. I think GW is a solid game, as is CoV/CoH - they each have healthy fan-bases, etc. Dungeon Runners is basically unabashed hack-n-slash, but it certainly has its own crowd. TR remains to be seen, as does Aion. But really, since NCSoft is serving to handle publishing of these games and not development directly, the "quality" of the games themselves isn't entirely in their hands.
I do agree that the games I listed are diferent in gameplay styles but they are still listed as a mmo products. They need to let their mmo games mature and grow a fanbase before they keep pumping out mmo games because they compete with one another within the company. Basically it is like that old saying, your're taking from Peter to pay Paul and never see a major increase of fans playing their games. In my opinion if they want to stay successful they need to branch out in other areas such as FPS and RTS games. Though I do believe that AIon will save them luckily. People keep talking about AOC and WAR but Aion will be more successful than both.
Hmm, I don't think that's necessarily true. Again, the games are different in style and setting. As I illustrated above, people who don't like superheroes/villains are not likely to play something like CoV/CoH anyway. Similarly, people who don't enjoy your "Korean-style Grind" games aren't going to play L2. There's a whole lot more MMOs out there than just what NCSoft has and yet all those games have some degree of player-base, despite the existence of others. In other words, they're not necessarily robbing Peter to play Paul as even in the absence of one game, they're not necessarily going to be playing the other. If CoV/CoH weren't around, that doesn't mean they'd automatically be playing GW, or any other NCSoft game for that matter. They might go off and play a MMO published by a different company altogether.
So, having variety in the different types of games they publish actually benefits them, they're providing more variety and potentially getting more overall business than they would with only a few different games. NCSoft is doing what publishing companies do - they bring a number of different products under their umbrella.
They obviously have a minimum standard of how they expect their games to perform, seeing as how they've decided to discontinue AutoAssault. So, I don't think they're just wildly picking up and clutching on to any MMO that comes their way. SOE could be said to be doing that - they're sitting on games that are, relatively speaking, ghost towns.
What you're suggesting would be like a book publisher only working with 1 or 2 authors who work in a specific genre. Well, there's only so much a single author can produce, so by doing that, they're limiting themselves and their potential reader-base. If one author writes romantic novels and one writes historical fiction, well now they're missing out on all the readers who might not like either of those genres, but would pick up some fantasy, or horror, or sci-fi, or crime novels, and so forth, in a moment. Cast a bigger net, you catch more fish.
Keep in mind, NCSoft acts as the publisher with most of their games. They oversee the development, set milestones and pay out checks to keep the developer going based on meeting those milestones. They then handle the publishing and, perhaps, distribution of a title, etc. They don't need a team the size of a typical dev team (esp. for a MMO) to do this.
Also, you're depicting the situation almost as though none of their games are doing well. L2 has something like 16 million players world-wide. Guildwars is very successful. CoV/CoH is successful, and so forth.
They should takes lessons from Blizzard. Blizzard over the years grew a nice size fanbase with great games such as Starcraft and Warcraft. Then they hit their fans with WOW and well look at them now, 6 million plus subs playing their game. You can't say that about any of NCSoft games,though Lineage 2 seems to have a nice showing of players in their game but it still doesn't come close as to what Blizzard has accomplished. NCSoft can only hope that Aion and Guild Wars 2 has great success. I'm not really a major fan of Blizzard but its hard not to notice how successful they are compared to everyone else.
NCSoft has done similarly, with Lineage and Lineage 2. The Lineage series is NCSoft's own IP, like Warcraft is Blizzard's. That said, L2 has more players worldwide than WoW does. It just so happens that where Blizzard sticks to their own titles, NCSoft branches out to publish others as well.
There's nothing wrong in what Blizzard is doing because, yes, they're a very popular Name with some great titles. They seem to have a degree of autonomy, like ID Software that, I would think, is quite enviable in the industry. However, there's nothing wrong in what NCSoft is doing either.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2007/11/123_14295.html
NcSoft's stock has declined by almost half in the last two months.
The article does not mention, but if you check out TR on Amazon--it has fallen to about #50 in rpgs category.
Until you spread your wings, you have no idea how far you can walk.