The title is a news? No, of course, someone has too leech the success in some way and make money. You know, there are peoples in this world employed to be tards and they also make a lot of money doing it.
The old news was from Penny Arcade and Blizzard’s unforeseeable success with World of Warcraft that was brought up as an excuse to the servers dying:
Based on our market analysis, we made some initial calculations about the size of the massively multiplayer online games market in the United States.
My answer at that time was: “Their analysts suck”
So we arrive at the news of today. SirBruce writes:
NCSoft just reported their financial results and they were well below analyst forecasts.
Guess what? “Their analysts suck again”
We are talking about City of Heroes here. Commenting the game I always repeated: “A casual gameplay is equal to casual subscribers”. In fact that’s what happened. The whole message:
NCSoft just reported their financial results and they were well below analyst forecasts. The biggest reason was lower than expected royalties from Taiwan due to fewer NCSoft players, as well as continued financial losses at their US and European subsidiaries. I’m sure now there will be more pressure than ever to get games like Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa out sooner rather than later.
The figures below are for December compared to September:
Lineage I “Monthly Access” – 2,085,385 down from 2,366,798
Lineage II “Monthly Access” – 2,065,187 up from 1,516,632
(This is entirely due to launch in China. Without China’s numbers, they’d be down to 1,413,535.)City of Heroes – 124,435 down from 163,053
The following is a general comment I wrote on Q23:
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Expanding the idea. My opinion (since I don’t have reliable sources) is that Shadowbane isn’t suffering the launch of EQ2 and WoW as much as other titles. DAoC, instead, is directly affected by those because WoW directly appeals to the same audience. Shadowbane is a different market with its own niche, personality and charisma. In the same way you can see that Eve-Online numbers are actually INCREASING.
City of Heroes is another case. It is ‘ruined’ by iteself. Once I commented: “A casual gameplay is equal to casual subscribers”.
Those numbers will go up again (slightly) after they launch the PvP and then, again, when they’ll launch City of Villains but I’m sure the game will keep oscillating between the margins it has already set (120-200k). Which isn’t bad considering that NCsoft will start to cannibalize its own numbers soon with Tabula Rasa, Guild Wars etc.. (Tabula Rasa will ‘fail’, you’ll see)
FFXI is probably strongly affected as well but you still have to consider that it isn’t that founded on the western market and the loss of subscribers is a detail for them. They do not go in panic mode when they have their own untouchable market space.
About DAoC I still believe in my own prediction. They’ll see the numbers rise after December but they’ll never get all back and they’ll lose more when WoW will launch in Europe. Long term they’ll lose some more but I’m SURE that it will be deserved, because it’s in their FULL possibilities to radically improve the game without suffering the market as they are now. If they fail it’s just their fault with no justification.
SOE is also feeling the impact. I’m not surprised, they won’t release numbers soon. Both EQ and SWG are leaking subscribers and they have zero (effective and working) plans to stop the hemorrhage of players. Long term they have the strength to impose themselves on the market again but they wasted too many resources and made too many errors. I also don’t see them learning, hence I expect to see even more errors.
EDIT: Interesting is also to consider Ultima Online. Sunsword commented that the release of WoW and EQ2 didn’t affect them. Completely different was, instead, the release of SWG. Guess what? This makes sense.
(my personal opinions)
Anyway, congratulations to NCsoft for the transparence. Let the hiding and tricking the subscriptions numbers practice to the losers.