Oh, look, their stocks are auguring into the ground:
At this rate, how long before they've lost so much they will need to start selling off IP in order to staunch the hemorrhaging? Or the stockholders call for a vote of No Confidence in the CEO?
Oh NCsoft, it couldn't have happened to a nicer company.
Completely off topic but i was at my local mall and a store called hot topic had a huge my little pony sign saying the ponys are back. Made me think of you so i thought i would tell you about it.
ReplyDeleteLooking at your 'boycott' banner reminded me of Tabula Rasa. A game I was really chomping at the bit to play but ended up being cancelled before I could. So yeah....bite me NCSoft.
ReplyDeleteWell, all the money that has boosted stock prices for Ruger and Smith & Wesson had to come from somewhere....
ReplyDeleteI don't know how many people South Korea has right now (quite a lot, no doubt) but if one assumes that their culture has a roughly similar outlook on video games as north america does, then it should be surprising to absolutely no-one that scorning half of their market is going to do bad things to their stock price.
ReplyDeleteEspecially given that this price drop is likely coming from the locations they axed - the shareholders in those places probably decided to just hock the last trace of their affiliation to NCSoft now that they've made it so very clear what they think of dirty foreign riff-raff.
I'm really disappointed about Wildstar, though. It looked interesting, and I loved the art style in the trailers and screenshots. But it's cancellation is all but inevitable now. NCSoft is only interested in the big moneymakers, and given how consumer backlash over City of Heroes has spilled into many other MMO communities, Wildstar is going to be facing a very poor launch. It would not surprise me at this point to hear it get cancelled before launch.
According to NCsoft's own website:
ReplyDeletehttp://global.ncsoft.com/global/gamenservice/playncgames.aspx?game=WildStar&category=MMO
Wildstar is developed by Paragon Studios, which based on NCsoft's own press releases currently has an employee count of zero. So based on their own website, WildStar has already been cancelled in all but name.
I'm not sure how to respond to that. That page does indeed state that Paragon Studios is doing Wildstar, but the game's actual page lists Carbine Studios (http://www.carbinestudios.com/en/) as the developer.
ReplyDeletePerhaps The NCSoft Global page is a typo? Possibly this error is caused by and compounded by portions of Paragon being absorbed by Carbine, which if true would be shenanigans that make me even more distrustful of the whole situation.