Hope You Don’t Like Wildstar

May 14

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If you are a fan of Wildstar, well, you might want to soak it in while it lasts:

Someone stood in the fire.

Not that that’s statistically likely.

The above graph is from NCSoft’s Q12015 report, which you can read here. Supposedly, “sales” does refer to all revenue brought in by a game through every channel, not just box sales. Reddit user “yeahreally2” summarizes as follows:

Company-wide sales are down 20% from the last quarter of 2014 from 235 billion won ($215 million USD) to 188 billion won ($172 million USD). Net income is down 43% from last quarter from 62 billion won to 35 billion won. NCsoft notes that income was high in the 4th quarter of last year “due to year-end promotions”. While NCsoft’s sales beat the forecast from Daewoo Securities (179 billion won), its operating profit and net income did not.

Guild Wars 2 performed slightly better in this quarter than last, probably boosted by the expansion hype exceeding Daewoo’s forecast by 3 billion won. Wildstar’s sales declined from 5.5 billion won ($5 million USD) in the previous quarter to 2.5 billion won ($2.3 million USD) in Q1. This is a 50% decrease in sales from the previous quarter, and is only slightly better than Daewoo’s projection of 2 billion won ($1.8 million USD).

I suppose it should not be particularly surprising given all the layoffs last October, but still… damn.

By the way, this was what the quarterly report looked like for City of Heroes at the end:

Uh oh.

Uh oh.

In other words, City of Heroes was making 2,855… units to Wildstar’s current 2,593 units. And NCSoft axed CoH the following quarter. So if Wildstar makes it to its own one-year anniversary, it will be quite the birthday present from NCSoft.

I enjoyed the graphics of Wildstar, the housing, the general tone, and the hoverboards. I was even playing with friends there for a little bit. Trouble was that the gameplay wasn’t all that fun. More involved than WoW? Sure. Also more exhausting, especially when every mob in the world has a telegraph you need to circle-strafe out of. Plus, I got stuck playing a class I didn’t actually find all that fun.

Hmm. Where have I heard that before?

Posted on May 14, 2015, in Wildstar and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. 5 Comments.

  1. Asmiroth | May 14, 2015 at 8:18 am

    I liked the game and even though I stopped playing after 4 months, I still keep track of it. While the news is certainly bad, it’s a head scratcher at the same time since they’ve continually applied content patches since launch. And not the planned stuff but a lot of content for a B2P/F2P conversion.

    Maybe some sort of SWTOR-like conversion is in the works?

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  3. Jeromai | May 14, 2015 at 8:36 pm

    They won’t axe immediately. They’ll give it a chance to make back a bit more money by converting to free to play and installing a cash shop first.

    CoH in its last throes was also valiantly trying to generate more revenue – first with the Going Rogue expansion, going F2P, then selling 10 buck packs of something or other in the shop which I’ve now blanked out on, was something like collectible cards or something to do with enhancements… It was just more or less keeping it afloat but apparently didn’t create a strong enough resurgence of interest and profit to move it back into NCsoft “ok” territory.

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