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NCSoft Financials Show Promise, Game Delays
Thanks to GameGossip for its story discussing Korea-originating MMO firm NCSoft's financial results for the first half of 2004. Along with an "operating profit [of] $23 million", specific sales/subscription numbers were announced, a rarity in the MMO world, as the company "reported that Lineage II and City Of Heroes are both doing well, with sales as of the end of June at 86,000 units (Lineage II) and 190,000 units (City Of Heroes) respectively. Meanwhile, as far as active players are concerned, NCsoft reported that Lineage II and [the soon to be cape-friendly] City Of Heroes have 76,000 and 170,000 active players respectively." However, delays to NCSoft's forthcoming titles were also announced, since "Guild Wars has been pushed from Q4 2004 to the first-half of 2005. Meanwhile, [recently re-organized Richard Garriott title] Tabula Rasa has fallen back from Q4 2004 to the second-half of 2005."
Oh man, capes! That's awesome. They look good too. City of Heroes sounds like its a really fun MMORPG, I;m glad to see it doing well.
Hopefully the delays in the other games will help them get up to CoH's level {I hear Lineage II kind of sucks, which seems to show in the sales figures}. Kind of like Blizzard, who delays games all the time, but it's in order to make/refine/perfect a superior product.
and yea, what's up with all the 503 errors?
done
so FFXI is roughly 3 times as popular as City of Heroes. nice figure.
consider also though that FFXI has roughly 10 times the content.
i recommend CoH to people that are into hero based action and FFXI to RPGers but i would have though that CoH had a player base of almost double that
I would have bought Lineage II if it wasn't a MMORPG. Good graphics, the best elements of both japanese and european/american RPGs, along with rather nice character generation. Shame really, that it became a MMORPG. No real story, monthly subscriptions and worst of all, other people, really ruin any RPG for me.
Hate me!
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
CoH for soloers and FFXI to social folks. I've spent 95% of my time in CoH doing things my own way, while FFXI forced me to either beg my friends to play or join up with often unreliable strangers. Or CoH for people with imagination that dig a healthy character generation and FFXI for folks that don't mind looking and performing exactly like someone else of the same class and level. To each his own, of course.
Guild Wars is by a bunch of ex Blizzard folk so the analogy is good. From what i've seen of it, it was already up to CoH's level at E3 and when they finally release it, it will be outstanding.
I'm betting Tabula Rasa is toast tho.
Lineage 2 is written with Korean gamers (the audience of Lineage 1) in mind. It does a lot of things we here in the states find to be very poor game design (the treadmill makes EQ look tame. I believe it took 2 people multui-playing an account for 20 hrs a day over a month to go level 70-75). It won't ever be very popular here in NA, and in Korea its competing with L1, the world's largest MMO.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I am happy that the statement about guild wars being pushed back is as far as arena.net knows is false.
44 Days was the time it took to go from 70-75 if I recall. Lineage II was fun. I played open and closed beta, but the grind just started too early. One of my friends bought 20 dollars worth of adena on ebay, used it to buy some stuff, then made the money back and sold it on ebay. He said that made it more fun because he got better pretty fast. The game looks like a blast at above level 40, but I just don't have the desire to play up to there right now.
I'm glad I'm not the only person to have this problem. The only way to get /. up right away is to delete my cookies and browse anon. WTF.
Quote from http://www.guildwars.com/Guildwars.com:
"What is the expected release date?
There has been no change in the release window, and we anticipate that Guild Wars will be released in the second half of 2004."
That was in the official game FAQ, where is this news of the game being delayed coming from?
Lineage 2 sucks.
The grinding sucks.
The developers don't fix broken things sucks.
They don't get rid of botters or adena farmers sucks.
They don't tell you what they fix sucks.
You only play because your clan got a castle.
Droves of people left prior to C1. Droves of people left one month after C1. They've seen it all, they've gone through castle seige, you only need level 53 to see all your skills, so there's no point going higher.
I'm sure lots of the 70k active players are not really active at all. They just haven't cancelled their account.
My old clan is half dissolved, my brother's clan (really big one) is fully dissolved, and he himself doesn't want to play the silly game.
I still have a level 3x character on it. But I doubt I'll ever go back.
In CoH, it took me 29 days to go from "Wow, this is amazingly cool" to "This is nine shades of suck."
Every door mission is the same. Getting a group to stay together long enough to complete a Task Force is nearly impossible. At level 19, I've essentially run out of new power options.
Still, I got more play out of it than I did with Everquest or Ultima Online.
www.kitchengeek.com -- Nosh for