NCsoft Earnings and Tabula Rasa
Here's an excerpt from a Gamespot article on NCsoft's earnings announcement on Wednesday:The company posted sales of 85 billion Korean won ($90.7 million) with a net profit of 12.8 billion won ($13.7 million), down from 87.8 billion won ($93.7 million) in revenue and the 20.4 billion won ($21.8 million) profit of a year ago.
The company attributed its success to sustained sales of Lineage and Lineage II (the popular Korean MMO games accounted for more than 76 percent of NCsoft's sales for the three-month period. Of the remainder, a little more than 14 percent came from Guild Wars, with more than 9 percent from the City of Heroes and City of Villains franchise. The rest of the company's active offerings--Auto Assault and the South Korean tennis game Smash Star--accounted for less than one-third of one percent of the publisher's sales.
I wrote a few months (May 15th) ago that I wouldn't be surprised if NCsoft left the American market entirely within two years, and I think they're still on that arc, unfortunately. When 3/4 of their revenue comes from one series (Lineage) and one market (Korea), they could leave the U.S. market, cut their expenses substantially, and greatly improve their profit margins.
This is also more confirmation (like we needed any) that Auto Assault is absolutely dead. Less than one-third of one percent of revenue? Ouch.
The wild card in all this, of course, is Tabula Rasa. Originally scheduled for release in Winter of 2004 (when we were all pretty interested), it's been delayed for over two and a half years now, and Gamestop lists it as a 6/1/07 release. At this point, I think it's a fair question to ask if this game is ever going to see the light of day. Richard Garriott is a legend and one of the most important people in the history of gaming, but his last great game was Ultima VII in 1993, and he's working in an entirely different genre with Tabula Rasa.
The people who would help Tabula Rasa get traction and make it a commercial success are people who have never heard of Richard Garriott. The gamer core from the early 1990's just isn't enough, even if we all played the game.
For now, I think Tabula Rasa is facing increasingly long odds.
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