We are heroes. This is what we do!
RIP City of Heroes
RIP City of Heroes
NCsoft's Earnings Report 1Q16
You all realize that this thread will be closed if you all keep on this rail. There is another thread devoted to the debate about the suspension in Legendary Weapon development.
Oh crud. I thought I was in the other thread.
On topic, I do not think that the lesson learned by NCSoft is likely to be more than tangentially related to the lessons that some of the playerbase wants ANet to have learned. It is nice to see that GW2 seems to be doing reasonably well financially.
Actually, “people who preorder are not competent consumers” is, unfortunately, an economic reality.
I’m afraid it’s not.
People will buy what they want to buy. There’s nothing incompetent about purchasing stuff. Someone buying something and it doesn’t quite work out to what they wanted isn’t something exclusive to pre-orders.
I can buy an O’Chicken Burger from a new restaurant called O’Donnel’s for instance. If it ends up not being what I expected, that’s not my fault as a consumer. It’s not me who was incompetent for purchasing something that looked like it would appeal to me.
It’s not buying the burger that makes you an incompetent consumer. Its the part where you pay for that burger, in full, a year or more in advance. The part where you rationalize how this type of consumer behavior is logical is the real icing on the cake here though.
Carry on though; Anet needs people like you.
Since when is buying something irrational?
Value is not absolute. You may think something holds less value, I may think something holds more value. That’s for each of us to make our own individual evaluations. Like I said earlier, I pre-purchased for the half-priced gems that I would only end up buying anyway at full price. If you think it’s more rational to buy the Expansion on Release date or later, and then buy gems at full price on top of that, well…
Carry on. Anet needs people like you!
Blood & Merlot [Wine]
I would ask why didn’t they realise this from the start? Why did it take the poor performance of HOT and the storm of criticism that followed it to make them change?
Because they listened to a vocal but very small minority as to what was needed in the game. They mistook “number of posts on reddit” for “number of players wanting these changes”.
This has been happening with software and software companies from the first day there was software for the masses. Years and years and years of this happening. Every software company has this happen. Are you going to stop having anything to do with computers and software?
Did someone say that here? I must have missed it if they did. What I saw was people saying they wouldn’t be as fast to give ANet their money. Which is a reasonable response when a company fails to meet someone’s expectations or to provide paid for content.
You’re absolutely right. If a company fails to meet your expectations, you absolutely should be wary about giving them more money. That’s all well and logical.
The thing is HoT exceeded by expectations. Because they said it would be small, I set my thinking along those lines. Did I expect more legendary weapons? Sure I did. But I didn’t expect to be able to glide everywhere and that, to my mind, increases the value of the product I bought more than legendaries would have. Therefore my expectations were exceeded.
But the real test of whether the product is worth it or not is the Living Story when it comes out. Because at the end of the day, if you want to continue with the game and the story, you have to own the expansion.
At which point, delaying the purchase would have made no difference to me. $100 isn’t going to make or break me whether I spend it now or a year from now.
I actually like HoT and it was about the size I was expecting it to be, so no problems there.
My problem came when they stopped working on what I paid for for an indefinite length of time. That didn’t sit well with me at all. Now if they had said, “put aside for a few months until we get sufficient content in the pipe and then we’ll restart it” that would have been acceptable enough to let slide. Unfortunately they have a history of “indefinite” turning into years, or never, and after seeing things promised as “one day” slide off into black holes, never to be seen or heard from again, I have no trust in them picking up dangling unmet promises unless they feel a financial bite.
Well I’m far more concerned with the good of the game as a whole, because I like the game. If Legendary weapons aren’t good for the game, I’m happy to let them stop them for now.
I’m sure when they made the announcement they expected more people to buy HOT. But there was a ton of negative publicity and people didn’t. Now people who work on legendaries are a subset of the population to begin with, so people who own HoT would be a subset of a subset of the playerbase. That’s a lot of work for a relatively small percentage of the player base. Manpower that probably could be used to better effect anywhere.
Anet probably looked at it and said, we can appease this small percentage of the playerbase and hurt the game, or we can hurt this small percentage of the player base and make the game better for more people.
I’m sure it wasn’t an easily reached decision. Mike O isn’t sitting on a beach in the Caribbean sipping a martini and laughing an evil laugh. He’s a business man that made a tough business decision based on the fact that the game didn’t sell as well as they thought it would, so they didn’t have the player base to justify the cost in man power. Not while so much of the expansion wasn’t meeting player satisfaction. Not while there’s a big lull in new content for players.
So yeah, kitten decision. I’m sure he hated making it. It wasn’t personal. It was something that was decided to make the game better. I can respect that that’s what he did.
When you start taking this stuff personally….Anet lied, Anet betrayed me, it feels like crap. But really, they had a strong business case to walk away from that feature, even though it was advertised. It sucks for everyone, including Anet.
They simply need to get back on track more than they need new legendaries. So far, at least, that’s working. They are getting back on track.
(edited by Vayne.8563)
This has been happening with software and software companies from the first day there was software for the masses. Years and years and years of this happening. Every software company has this happen. Are you going to stop having anything to do with computers and software?
Did someone say that here? I must have missed it if they did. What I saw was people saying they wouldn’t be as fast to give ANet their money. Which is a reasonable response when a company fails to meet someone’s expectations or to provide paid for content.
You’re absolutely right. If a company fails to meet your expectations, you absolutely should be wary about giving them more money. That’s all well and logical.
The thing is HoT exceeded by expectations. Because they said it would be small, I set my thinking along those lines. Did I expect more legendary weapons? Sure I did. But I didn’t expect to be able to glide everywhere and that, to my mind, increases the value of the product I bought more than legendaries would have. Therefore my expectations were exceeded.
But the real test of whether the product is worth it or not is the Living Story when it comes out. Because at the end of the day, if you want to continue with the game and the story, you have to own the expansion.
At which point, delaying the purchase would have made no difference to me. $100 isn’t going to make or break me whether I spend it now or a year from now.
I actually like HoT and it was about the size I was expecting it to be, so no problems there.
My problem came when they stopped working on what I paid for for an indefinite length of time. That didn’t sit well with me at all. Now if they had said, “put aside for a few months until we get sufficient content in the pipe and then we’ll restart it” that would have been acceptable enough to let slide. Unfortunately they have a history of “indefinite” turning into years, or never, and after seeing things promised as “one day” slide off into black holes, never to be seen or heard from again, I have no trust in them picking up dangling unmet promises unless they feel a financial bite.
Well I’m far more concerned with the good of the game as a whole, because I like the game. If Legendary weapons aren’t good for the game, I’m happy to let them stop them for now.
I’m sure when they made the announcement they expected more people to buy HOT. But there was a ton of negative publicity and people didn’t. Now people who work on legendaries are a subset of the population to begin with, so people who own HoT would be a subset of a subset of the playerbase. That’s a lot of work for a relatively small percentage of the player base. Manpower that probably could be used to better effect anywhere.
Anet probably looked at it and said, we can appease this small percentage of the playerbase and hurt the game, or we can hurt this small percentage of the player base and make the game better for more people.
I’m sure it wasn’t an easily reached decision. Mike O isn’t sitting on a beach in the Caribbean sipping a martini and laughing an evil laugh. He’s a business man that made a tough business decision based on the fact that the game didn’t sell as well as they thought it would, so they didn’t have the player base to justify the cost in man power. Not while so much of the expansion wasn’t meeting player satisfaction. Not while there’s a big lull in new content for players.
So yeah, kitten decision. I’m sure he hated making it. It wasn’t personal. It was something that was decided to make the game better. I can respect that that’s what he did.
When you start taking this stuff personally….Anet lied, Anet betrayed me, it feels like crap. But really, they had a strong business case to walk away from that feature, even though it was advertised. It sucks for everyone, including Anet.
They simply need to get back on track more than they need new legendaries. So far, at least, that’s working. They are getting back on track.
As said by someone else, this is derailing the thread so we will have to agree to disagree on this topic.
Be careful what you ask for
ANet may give it to you.
ANet may give it to you.
This has been happening with software and software companies from the first day there was software for the masses. Years and years and years of this happening. Every software company has this happen. Are you going to stop having anything to do with computers and software?
Did someone say that here? I must have missed it if they did. What I saw was people saying they wouldn’t be as fast to give ANet their money. Which is a reasonable response when a company fails to meet someone’s expectations or to provide paid for content.
You’re absolutely right. If a company fails to meet your expectations, you absolutely should be wary about giving them more money. That’s all well and logical.
The thing is HoT exceeded by expectations. Because they said it would be small, I set my thinking along those lines. Did I expect more legendary weapons? Sure I did. But I didn’t expect to be able to glide everywhere and that, to my mind, increases the value of the product I bought more than legendaries would have. Therefore my expectations were exceeded.
But the real test of whether the product is worth it or not is the Living Story when it comes out. Because at the end of the day, if you want to continue with the game and the story, you have to own the expansion.
At which point, delaying the purchase would have made no difference to me. $100 isn’t going to make or break me whether I spend it now or a year from now.
I actually like HoT and it was about the size I was expecting it to be, so no problems there.
My problem came when they stopped working on what I paid for for an indefinite length of time. That didn’t sit well with me at all. Now if they had said, “put aside for a few months until we get sufficient content in the pipe and then we’ll restart it” that would have been acceptable enough to let slide. Unfortunately they have a history of “indefinite” turning into years, or never, and after seeing things promised as “one day” slide off into black holes, never to be seen or heard from again, I have no trust in them picking up dangling unmet promises unless they feel a financial bite.
Well I’m far more concerned with the good of the game as a whole, because I like the game. If Legendary weapons aren’t good for the game, I’m happy to let them stop them for now.
I’m sure when they made the announcement they expected more people to buy HOT. But there was a ton of negative publicity and people didn’t. Now people who work on legendaries are a subset of the population to begin with, so people who own HoT would be a subset of a subset of the playerbase. That’s a lot of work for a relatively small percentage of the player base. Manpower that probably could be used to better effect anywhere.
Anet probably looked at it and said, we can appease this small percentage of the playerbase and hurt the game, or we can hurt this small percentage of the player base and make the game better for more people.
I’m sure it wasn’t an easily reached decision. Mike O isn’t sitting on a beach in the Caribbean sipping a martini and laughing an evil laugh. He’s a business man that made a tough business decision based on the fact that the game didn’t sell as well as they thought it would, so they didn’t have the player base to justify the cost in man power. Not while so much of the expansion wasn’t meeting player satisfaction. Not while there’s a big lull in new content for players.
So yeah, kitten decision. I’m sure he hated making it. It wasn’t personal. It was something that was decided to make the game better. I can respect that that’s what he did.
When you start taking this stuff personally….Anet lied, Anet betrayed me, it feels like crap. But really, they had a strong business case to walk away from that feature, even though it was advertised. It sucks for everyone, including Anet.
They simply need to get back on track more than they need new legendaries. So far, at least, that’s working. They are getting back on track.
As said by someone else, this is derailing the thread so we will have to agree to disagree on this topic.
I’m not sure it’s as off topic as all that, but I agree I’m not going to change your mind and you’re not going to change mine.
My opinion is that this decision was made because of the information revealed in the quarterly report. Still not going to change your mind, obviously, but it stems from the information in the report itself.
I’m not really surprised HOT underperformed, there was a boatload of negative publicity before launch, a lot of which was the fault of whoever made the decision not to include a character slot, and also whoever made the dungeon nerf decision. Those decisions together (along with some others) definitely hurt HoT sales.
This has been happening with software and software companies from the first day there was software for the masses. Years and years and years of this happening. Every software company has this happen. Are you going to stop having anything to do with computers and software?
Did someone say that here? I must have missed it if they did. What I saw was people saying they wouldn’t be as fast to give ANet their money. Which is a reasonable response when a company fails to meet someone’s expectations or to provide paid for content.
You’re absolutely right. If a company fails to meet your expectations, you absolutely should be wary about giving them more money. That’s all well and logical.
The thing is HoT exceeded by expectations. Because they said it would be small, I set my thinking along those lines. Did I expect more legendary weapons? Sure I did. But I didn’t expect to be able to glide everywhere and that, to my mind, increases the value of the product I bought more than legendaries would have. Therefore my expectations were exceeded.
But the real test of whether the product is worth it or not is the Living Story when it comes out. Because at the end of the day, if you want to continue with the game and the story, you have to own the expansion.
At which point, delaying the purchase would have made no difference to me. $100 isn’t going to make or break me whether I spend it now or a year from now.
I actually like HoT and it was about the size I was expecting it to be, so no problems there.
My problem came when they stopped working on what I paid for for an indefinite length of time. That didn’t sit well with me at all. Now if they had said, “put aside for a few months until we get sufficient content in the pipe and then we’ll restart it” that would have been acceptable enough to let slide. Unfortunately they have a history of “indefinite” turning into years, or never, and after seeing things promised as “one day” slide off into black holes, never to be seen or heard from again, I have no trust in them picking up dangling unmet promises unless they feel a financial bite.
Well I’m far more concerned with the good of the game as a whole, because I like the game. If Legendary weapons aren’t good for the game, I’m happy to let them stop them for now.
I’m sure when they made the announcement they expected more people to buy HOT. But there was a ton of negative publicity and people didn’t. Now people who work on legendaries are a subset of the population to begin with, so people who own HoT would be a subset of a subset of the playerbase. That’s a lot of work for a relatively small percentage of the player base. Manpower that probably could be used to better effect anywhere.
Anet probably looked at it and said, we can appease this small percentage of the playerbase and hurt the game, or we can hurt this small percentage of the player base and make the game better for more people.
I’m sure it wasn’t an easily reached decision. Mike O isn’t sitting on a beach in the Caribbean sipping a martini and laughing an evil laugh. He’s a business man that made a tough business decision based on the fact that the game didn’t sell as well as they thought it would, so they didn’t have the player base to justify the cost in man power. Not while so much of the expansion wasn’t meeting player satisfaction. Not while there’s a big lull in new content for players.
So yeah, kitten decision. I’m sure he hated making it. It wasn’t personal. It was something that was decided to make the game better. I can respect that that’s what he did.
When you start taking this stuff personally….Anet lied, Anet betrayed me, it feels like crap. But really, they had a strong business case to walk away from that feature, even though it was advertised. It sucks for everyone, including Anet.
They simply need to get back on track more than they need new legendaries. So far, at least, that’s working. They are getting back on track.
As said by someone else, this is derailing the thread so we will have to agree to disagree on this topic.
I’m not sure it’s as off topic as all that, but I agree I’m not going to change your mind and you’re not going to change mine.
My opinion is that this decision was made because of the information revealed in the quarterly report. Still not going to change your mind, obviously, but it stems from the information in the report itself.
I’m not really surprised HOT underperformed, there was a boatload of negative publicity before launch, a lot of which was the fault of whoever made the decision not to include a character slot, and also whoever made the dungeon nerf decision. Those decisions together (along with some others) definitely hurt HoT sales.
I feel the appropriate thread for the discussion on Legendary Weapons is Legendary Weapons, since this thread is about the reported earnings.
Be careful what you ask for
ANet may give it to you.
ANet may give it to you.
(edited by Just a flesh wound.3589)
I’m not really surprised HOT underperformed, there was a boatload of negative publicity before launch, a lot of which was the fault of whoever made the decision not to include a character slot, and also whoever made the dungeon nerf decision. Those decisions together (along with some others) definitely hurt HoT sales.
While I am inclined to agree with that those decisions hurt the sale of HoT, far more then say, putting Legendary Weapons on hold, the real question here is, Is this something NCsoft would concern themselves with when looking at the sales reports
Long discussion made short, when NC Soft said “Lesson Learnt” what lesson were they talking about?
Was it perhaps that they invested too much funds into HOT, Was it perhaps they waited too long to launch an Expansion? Perhaps a combo of the two?
There are two kinds of gamers, salty, and extra salty
The statement in the conference call is ambiguous at best.
- Earnings from the expansion weren’t up to our expectations
- Lesson learned
- Next expansion will be coming soon
That’s pretty uninformative. It could mean they hyped the earning from the expansion it too much to the analysts.
Basically NCSOFT are fairly clueless in their predictions in NA/EU markets. They didn’t think GW2 would as sell as well as it did in 2012. They thought WildStar would have sold better. AION and Lineage 2 in NA is barely better than WildStar currently and they already handed the running of those to titles to 3rd parties in EU. BnS is doing well enough considering it’s F2P but it’s more a fighting game dressed up as an MMO. And at some point it will catch up to the version in Korea/China.
We are heroes. This is what we do!
RIP City of Heroes
RIP City of Heroes
I’m not really surprised HOT underperformed, there was a boatload of negative publicity before launch, a lot of which was the fault of whoever made the decision not to include a character slot, and also whoever made the dungeon nerf decision. Those decisions together (along with some others) definitely hurt HoT sales.
While I am inclined to agree with that those decisions hurt the sale of HoT, far more then say, putting Legendary Weapons on hold, the real question here is, Is this something NCsoft would concern themselves with when looking at the sales reports
Long discussion made short, when NC Soft said “Lesson Learnt” what lesson were they talking about?
Was it perhaps that they invested too much funds into HOT, Was it perhaps they waited too long to launch an Expansion? Perhaps a combo of the two?
I don’t really care what lesson NcSoft learned. I’m far more interested in learning what lessons Anet learned. And from what I can glean (which is little enough) there’s every chance the next expansion won’t be HoT-like.
I’m not really surprised HOT underperformed, there was a boatload of negative publicity before launch, a lot of which was the fault of whoever made the decision not to include a character slot, and also whoever made the dungeon nerf decision. Those decisions together (along with some others) definitely hurt HoT sales.
While I am inclined to agree with that those decisions hurt the sale of HoT, far more then say, putting Legendary Weapons on hold, the real question here is, Is this something NCsoft would concern themselves with when looking at the sales reports
Long discussion made short, when NC Soft said “Lesson Learnt” what lesson were they talking about?
Was it perhaps that they invested too much funds into HOT, Was it perhaps they waited too long to launch an Expansion? Perhaps a combo of the two?
I don’t really care what lesson NcSoft learned. I’m far more interested in learning what lessons Anet learned. And from what I can glean (which is little enough) there’s every chance the next expansion won’t be HoT-like.
But it is a question that we should consider, if for no other reason, then to wonder if the same kinds of funds and resources will allocated to the new expansion, or will it end up a cheap rush job, because a lesson was learned?
There are two kinds of gamers, salty, and extra salty
This has been happening with software and software companies from the first day there was software for the masses. Years and years and years of this happening. Every software company has this happen. Are you going to stop having anything to do with computers and software?
Did someone say that here? I must have missed it if they did. What I saw was people saying they wouldn’t be as fast to give ANet their money. Which is a reasonable response when a company fails to meet someone’s expectations or to provide paid for content.
You’re absolutely right. If a company fails to meet your expectations, you absolutely should be wary about giving them more money. That’s all well and logical.
The thing is HoT exceeded by expectations. Because they said it would be small, I set my thinking along those lines. Did I expect more legendary weapons? Sure I did. But I didn’t expect to be able to glide everywhere and that, to my mind, increases the value of the product I bought more than legendaries would have. Therefore my expectations were exceeded.
But the real test of whether the product is worth it or not is the Living Story when it comes out. Because at the end of the day, if you want to continue with the game and the story, you have to own the expansion.
At which point, delaying the purchase would have made no difference to me. $100 isn’t going to make or break me whether I spend it now or a year from now.
I actually like HoT and it was about the size I was expecting it to be, so no problems there.
My problem came when they stopped working on what I paid for for an indefinite length of time. That didn’t sit well with me at all. Now if they had said, “put aside for a few months until we get sufficient content in the pipe and then we’ll restart it” that would have been acceptable enough to let slide. Unfortunately they have a history of “indefinite” turning into years, or never, and after seeing things promised as “one day” slide off into black holes, never to be seen or heard from again, I have no trust in them picking up dangling unmet promises unless they feel a financial bite.
Well I’m far more concerned with the good of the game as a whole, because I like the game. If Legendary weapons aren’t good for the game, I’m happy to let them stop them for now.
I’m sure when they made the announcement they expected more people to buy HOT. But there was a ton of negative publicity and people didn’t. Now people who work on legendaries are a subset of the population to begin with, so people who own HoT would be a subset of a subset of the playerbase. That’s a lot of work for a relatively small percentage of the player base. Manpower that probably could be used to better effect anywhere.
Anet probably looked at it and said, we can appease this small percentage of the playerbase and hurt the game, or we can hurt this small percentage of the player base and make the game better for more people.
I’m sure it wasn’t an easily reached decision. Mike O isn’t sitting on a beach in the Caribbean sipping a martini and laughing an evil laugh. He’s a business man that made a tough business decision based on the fact that the game didn’t sell as well as they thought it would, so they didn’t have the player base to justify the cost in man power. Not while so much of the expansion wasn’t meeting player satisfaction. Not while there’s a big lull in new content for players.
So yeah, kitten decision. I’m sure he hated making it. It wasn’t personal. It was something that was decided to make the game better. I can respect that that’s what he did.
When you start taking this stuff personally….Anet lied, Anet betrayed me, it feels like crap. But really, they had a strong business case to walk away from that feature, even though it was advertised. It sucks for everyone, including Anet.
They simply need to get back on track more than they need new legendaries. So far, at least, that’s working. They are getting back on track.
Just look at yourself and what you’re writing. Most people are more casual and you EXPECT the developers to fight against casuals, but bc there weren’t enough casuals buying it they can’t justify working against their interests
And that’s a “tought decision.”
Really everyone if you want to see what a scam developers are you have to see this inside look at their thinking processes. Meanwhile “there are not enough resources to do anything else” unbelievable.