Brillig
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Posts
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Quote:NC Soft has never before reported a quarterly loss.Originally Posted by CactusBrawler
They've done it seven times before.
Books looking bad? Axe a small studio.
And what seven small studios have they axed? -
Quote:Say what? You're not talking about Z in this thread, are you? Because all he said was that it was a rumor.Originally Posted by Steele_Magnolia
This has already been debunked by a red name as a lie. NCSoft will have to try for better propaganda.
My sig says it all. I will not let this die. Facebook and Twitter, my friends, let's unleash the power of social media.
Guess what. Every single explanation of why they closed Paragon is a rumor. Given that, we have to evaluate each one based on its credibility, and I find it a lot more credible than NCSoft closing Paragon because their CEO had a bad hair day. -
Dammit, I'm doing it again. Trying to educate the financially illiterate. I'm out, please resume incomprehensible conspiracy theories.
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Quote:And what balances the loss of CoH revenue?Originally Posted by Golden Girl
The GW2 server problems and the suspension of GW2 digital sales will hit their Q3 earnings - the savings made by axing a small-ish studio should help to balance the loss.
You do realize they're also going to take a one-time hit for severance for Paragon employees, right?
Every single "they killed Paragon to make their financials look better" idea I've seen has been completely delusional. -
Quote:This is quite true. It's also true that not that many people wanted what CoH did.Originally Posted by Next_Spirit
It's not boycotting in actuality. Its the idea that no other game will offer what CoH does for people. It's all the same ole ****, again.
You don't have to predict. NCSoft is a publicly traded company and their earnings statements are public record. CoH is 2% of NCSoft's gross sales.Quote:Originally Posted by Next_Spirit
Which gets stale after awhile. I am predicting a loss of a lot of money. -
"Reality check on aisle two, we need a reality check."
CoH has very little to do with NCSoft's bottom line. And yeah, they lost some goodwill. But honestly, I'd be shocked if the number of people who will actually boycott NCSoft reaches 5 digits. -
Hey,
Thanks for being the mad doctor. Someone had to. -
While it would be nice to know what was in store, I don't want anyone to get their hopes too high. The IP still belongs to NCSoft and the devs may be under an NDA with regards to it.
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I give up. Trying to get you people to actually understand financials and business is a waste of my time.
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Quote:Yeah. Because that link provides no ammunition for that argument at all.Originally Posted by CptShwan
Also, for those who want ammunition for the "They shuttered CoH for their servers" argument:
http://techland.time.com/2012/08/29/...me-experience/
How does having servers in three months help GW2 now?
It's an absurd argument. You don't shut down a profitable business line because of a temporary shortage in another. -
Quote:That makes me laugh almost as hard as EBITDA. A loss is a loss is a loss.Originally Posted by Starsman
It was unprecedented... but it was not "losing money". It was a one time transaction, badly calculated but a one time thing. It was not an ongoing loss.
Well if we're going to toss out one-time events, let's disregard GW2 for a sec.
Looking at their costs breakdown for the past year, it seems that the best they are likely to come in at in Q3 is 117 bn Wn.
Now look at their revenues. Let's assume that AION stays flat (which could be optimistic). And that Lineage goes back down to Q1 levels (anyone follow that game? know what the spike was about?). Kill the small contribution from CoH. Their sales would be roughtl 111 bn Wn.
So outside of GW2, they're still losing money in Q3. And this is far from a worst case scenario. -
Quote:If you turn in a negative quarter after never having done so before, that's pretty much the definition of unprecedented.Originally Posted by Starsman
They were not. NCSoft wasted 96.7 million this past quarter to aquire Ntreev Soft, a casual online game company.
They hit the red, but only because they didnt expect some games, especially Aion, to dip in the micro-transaction side as harshly as it did during the quarter.
This does not mean that Aion lost money, it still made much more than CoH, but now they found themselves in the red. It would had been a one-quarter thing, but the laws of bad business dictate you cant let that go without cutting costs somewhere.
In the end Paragon Studio paid the price of aquiring an online mini-golf video game maker.
Just because you don't like a decision doesn't make it a bad business decision. -
Thanks for the game, thanks for the fun, but most of all, thanks for the memories.
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Quote:Indeed. You've outed me. I confess - I can look at a calendar.Originally Posted by Rubberlad
Now *that's* an interesting admission... There's only one way you could know the specific timeline for sure.
These are Q2 results. Q2 ended June 30th. The reports were released on August 8th. In the old days, it took weeks to compile all these results and put them in a presentation. But with modern technology, these numbers are available practically real-time in any company.
The remainder is left as an exercise for the student. -
Quote:Ok. Just stop reading the earnings report. You don't understand it at all.Originally Posted by Rubberlad
So despite Aion's sales outperforming CoH's by 26%, it's still considered "weak" ... That's not reason to be joyful in anyone's book. Granted there's a lot of ways to interpret why NCsoft felt this was a poor showing but its pretty clear that the word "weak" means NCsoft is viewing their glass as half empty and not half full.
Aion's sales outperformed CoH's by 1173%. Not 26%.
The reason why Aion sales were called out as weak is because they declined 31% quarter over quarter and 33% year over year.
You don't understand the financials being reported. Please stop drawing conclusions from your misapprehensions. -
Quote:You're on solid ground up til this point.Originally Posted by Rubberlad
I'm not suggesting any such thing. Whether it took them five minutes to decide a course of action or weeks of deliberation is irrelevant. The fact is they made the decision to cut City of Heroes loose and I personally vehemently disagree with their decision.
Here is where you go off the rails. First of all, you have no idea what the underlying reasons were, so you have no basis to determine whether the decision was right or wrong. Suppose PWE had said that they wanted 50% of gross sales to continue using the engine? In that case, the decision would have been right.Quote:Originally Posted by Rubberlad
It was the wrong course of action but right or wrong, I'm sure they felt hard-pressed to act quickly -- or else.
And as for feeling hard-pressed to act quickly - the executives at NCSoft know about these numbers well in advance of their publication. They had over a month to figure out the correct course of action. No one there was shooting from the hip.
Of course executives make mistakes (that's why they're executives! heh). But the fact that they have in the past doesn't automatically lead to the conclusion that they are wrong now.Quote:Originally Posted by Rubberlad
Even CEO's and other members of executive leadership make mistakes (they're human after all and can be as fallible as anyone else in their thinking). I can sight any number of former executives in the US alone who've been unexpectedly shown the exit door with a golden parachute because they made some very ill-considered choices which ultimately damaged the brand and the company. If, in the coming year, we see a shake-up in NCsoft's leadership, then we'll both know what happened (and why it needed to happen).
Also, if there's a shake-up at the top, no, we won't know what happened behind the scenes. We'll just be able to speculate more. -
Quote:You're reading the chart wrong. CoH sales were $10M/year, not profit.Originally Posted by TerraDraconis
Exactly. Which is why I'm fond of my theory that NCSoft has gotten in the habit of making their books look better by closing a game every couple of years. They found some way to do use it to their advantage and just keep doing it. COH/Paragon made them money but compared to their other sources it wasn't that huge.
See for some reason NCSoft feels that they can gain an advantage by tossing away a solid $10 Million per year profit source. And remember that was $10 Million profit not the total the game brought in. -
Quote:Basically, you're alleging that they couldn't take five minutes to look at a spreadsheet before making a decision.Originally Posted by Rubberlad
It's not that CoH was losing money, it's that it wasn't making *AS MUCH or MORE money* as some of the other aged IPs in NCsoft's portfolio. Again, the Earnings Report calls Aion's sales "weak" for xyz reason and that game was outperforming City of Heroes by a longshot.
I'm sure the company was losing money due to a culmination of mistakes across its entire portfolio. Rather than take the time to investigate and tighten up each IP's operating costs, they took the easy way out. I'm not saying or condoning their response as a smart business decision but I will say they definitely took the quick and easy way out by dropping City of Heroes.
Again, not the choice I would have made - especially in light of GW's strong sales. They easily could have (and should have) kept CoH on board and made strategic improvements across *all* their IPs. It's much to our chagrin however that they didn't. Blame NCsoft's corporate leadership for panicking.
That's off the charts ludicrous. -
Quote:You'd be surprised...Originally Posted by Rubberlad
Heh, you've never been through the corporate acquisitions/liquidation process or participated in board meetings where the top brass discuss options to improve the company's bottom line have you? If you have, then let me come work for your company because the ones I've worked for in the past have all gone down the same road NCsoft has taken for a variety of reasons but always working towards the same result.
You're fine right up til that point.Quote:Originally Posted by Rubberlad
"This company needs to make money and remain profitable."
What happens next is that they look to cut things that are losing money. If, as we believe, CoH wasn't losing money, then they wouldn't have cut it.
Now cutting the new project that Paragon was working on - that would have made sense. But why kill CoH? As long as it was breaking even or turning a small profit, there's no way the balance sheet looks better after doing that.
The only (far-out) scenario which would make sense is if there were something written down that said Paragon was going to continue to work on the new MMO as long as Paragon existed. Then CoH would be collateral to killing the new MMO project. But I find that pretty implausible. -
I'm sorry, but the premise is incorrect.
It's true that NCSoft was losing money at an unprecedented rate, but CoH and Paragon didn't get axed because they were the smallest. Nor (as has been speculated elsewhere), did they get axed for the tax write-off. Nor did they get axed to appease angry shareholders.
None of those make sense even at a Business 101 level.
(It is possible that the management of NCSoft went bat**** crazy. But very unlikely.)
The only ways this move makes sense are:
1) Paragon was losing significant amounts of money.
2) Some upcoming event was going to make it impossible to continue for Paragon (e.g., the speculated license renewal issue.) -
Quote:You can invite a VIP to your SG long enough to pay the rent.Originally Posted by Rubberlad
Just discovered this - the "pay base rent" option is gone from the super group registrar in Atlas Park. You can still use influence to boost the SG's prestige and see a list of all SGs but the option to pay your base rent is now gone...
I'm now forever locked out of my SG base... I wasn't ready!
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The Nov 30 date has been published a bunch of places, many of them press. I think that's pretty solid.
As far as VIP goes, my *speculation* is that they will just give VIP to everyone for the last three months.
As far as unreleased content goes, it's 99.99% certain that none of it will be released. Not only did they lay off the engineers making it, but also those people testing it.
I think the store will remain open, but you won't be able to get any more points.
The staff - I could be wrong, but I think the GMs are employed by NCSoft and support all their games, so GM support should still be available (though possibly de-prioritized). Same for the server techs, so if the hardware has a booboo, they can reboot and restart stuff. That is about all the support that the game is going to get, in my estimation. -
Quote:Probably because a) it was years and tens of millions of dollars away from being ready to go and b) it was going to be an MMO, which is increasingly looking like a really bad bet.Originally Posted by That_Ninja
Wait, if PS had another, non Cryptic-engine game in development, why did they get the axe? I don't care about PWE now, NCsoft is where my ire is going to be.
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Quote:Not necessarily. I think in a lot of circles, people would just shake their heads at the incompetence of NCSoft in not getting renewal terms baked into the contract at the outset.Originally Posted by Aisynia
It would be a disastrous business decision to pull the license like that. Yeah, by pulling the license, they eliminate a competitor.. but they also eliminate any kind of confidence in their brand, which is more important. Other companies and development houses would see PWE as toxic if they did that. If PWE will do that to NC, what would stop them from doing it to anyone else? No, as ruthless as PWE is, they are too smart for that.
Seriously, if you're going to do business with a competitor, you'd better make sure that you don't give them a gilded invitation to screw you - that's Business 101.
I've seen this speculation a few times, and it doesn't hold water IMO. A tax writeoff is only useful when a company is actually profitable. It doesn't do you any good when the root problem is that you're not making any profits.Quote:Originally Posted by Aisynia
I think this is NC. They took a huge loss over the last year because of that game that starts with "A", and they may have shut down Paragon in order to use it as a tax writeoff. -
What the hell is wrong with you people?!?!
