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Daewoo Securities: WildStar's revenues will fall to near $0 by Q4 2016

http://mmos.com/news/investment-bank-predicts-grim-future-for-wildstar

Ever since WildStar went free to play in the West on September 29, 2015, hopes of a turnaround for the ailing franchise have remained high. Servers were slowly filling back up again and the game world felt "full" for the first time since release. This hasn't stopped Daewoo Securities, South Korea's largest Investment Bank, from issuing a dire prediction for Wildstar's future revenues. Chang-kwaen Kim and Jeong-yeob Park, who wrote the report were bullish on NCSoft's prospects predicting an 18% increase in the company's stock price, but were negative about Wildstar's prospects. They predict WildStar's revenues will fall to near $0 by Q4 2016 as seen here:

wildstar-revenues.JPG-nggid0543867-ngg0dyn-700x538x100-00f0w010c010r110f110r010t010.JPG


The analyst note was published on January 19th, 2016 and also reveals the remarkable strength of Lineage 1, which is expected to grow revenues by 3.4% in 2016. Blade and Soul and Guild Wars 2 remain the two strongest games in NCSoft's platform after Lineage, but both are expected to suffer double digit declines in revenue in 2016. If things don't turn around for WildStar in the coming year, NCSoft could end up shutting the game down. Given that the game just recently transitioned to free to play, it may be a bit early to write it off, but as-is the game has been a financial failure for NCSoft, bringing in only ~$50 million in revenue since launch (80% of which was in 2014 due initial buzz and retail sales).

Apparently Daewoo Securities is the largest investment bank in South Korea?

What a fucking mess this game has been. Piss poor support post launch, an AWFUL F2P launch, and no new raid content in a year and a half, with no upcoming release date for the next raid (and there's only one smaller raid, Protostar All-Stars, with Red Moon being delayed to drop 8).

They even fucked up the F2P transition, too. They had a great system in place, but next to nothing is account bound, and the only things added to the shop are piss poor or RNG based.

It's a shame. The core gameplay with the telegraphs is wonderful, the zones are nice, etc. It's easily the first MMO I've played since WoW where it felt like a proper evolution of the mechanics, rather than a clone or something completely different. But NCSOFT + Carbine have mismanaged this beyond belief. Such a god damn shame.

This game isn't going to even last to Q42016, IMO. NCSOFT won't let it.

Lock if old.
 

Breads

Banned
I don't know what's more impressive. The fact that Lineage 2 is still alive.

Or the fact that Lineage is STILL thriving holy shit.
 
I think they misread it. If I understand it well, its 0 billion of korean won. Basically, it'll be under a billion so under 1 million dollars of revenue. But not near 0 dollars.
 
What was the USP for this game? I remember people on GAF being hyped for it but when I watched the trailer I had no interest in it
 
How the hell is lineage 1 making SO MUCH money? I mean I can understand an old game still being popular, but the revenue is far, far beyond any other game listed.
 

ViciousDS

Banned
With Blade & Soul out, I don't think WildStar will even have a big community

Wasn't there some servers already dead during pre start for that game lol. I don't see blade and soul lasting to long either. It came out way to late. Black desert is almost here. Blade and soul was announced around Aion lol.....they killed the game in taking so long to get over here.
 

Freiya

Member
Wasn't there some servers already dead during pre start for that game lol. I don't see blade and soul lasting to long either. It came out way to late. Black desert is almost here. Blade and soul was announced around Aion lol.....they killed the game in taking so long to get over here.

FYI every single server on BNS has a queue right now.
 

DrBo42

Member
Poor Carbine. No way this game survives another year. You'd think they'd have a solid plan of action for content release with the F2P launch but apparently not. Kinda their own fault at this point. Imagine it's the classic story of poor management.
 

Quonny

Member
.


Time Will tell. But I think it's going to fade fast. I think most are just waiting for Black desert to launch or another mmo to receive there content update. B&S is just filler to probably quite a bit.

How many servers does B&S have?
Black Desert has literally no end-game. It'll die faster than WildStar.
 
Black Desert has literally no end-game. It'll die faster than WildStar.

Yeah this is what I heard too. Apparently even in Korea it didn't really take off, meanwhile B&S is still one of the top MMOs there and since it have been out for some time in Asia it probably has enough content to last players for a while.
 

Psyren

Member
Black Desert has literally no end-game. It'll die faster than WildStar.

As long as they can tap the casual population, and not go overboard with the cash store pricing/screwage i think it will be okay, at least here in the West...

As for WildStar... This game was a colossal mess of poor management from the get go. The thing that still gets me is the fact that they thought that pandering to the "omg vanilla WoW days were the best hey guis"-crowd was what would bring them success... That population of MMOers are a tiny tiny, and extremely vocal minority...
 

Zombine

Banned
What's crazy is that this was one of the games that pushed me over the edge to build my first gaming PC. I never even tried the game and got hooked on CS:GO.
 
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Time Will tell. But I think it's going to fade fast. I think most are just waiting for Black desert to launch or another mmo to receive there content update. B&S is just filler to probably quite a bit.

How many servers does B&S have?

BnS is a big esport in Korea and it's like the 5th or 6th biggest game there right alongside Aion. It's not going anywhere no matter how much you seem to wish.

Also I played KR and NA CBT1 Black Desert. Imagine if they made a sandbox and forgot to put sand in and that's BDO. The character creator is insane though and it's very pretty. And yes, it's a sandbox, there is no PvE endgame whatsoever.
 

Klyka

Banned
I remember when Wildstar was supposed to get a new content drop EVERY MONTH

sigh,so sad to see the game die. I really REALLY liked the combat system
 

TheYanger

Member
Real Shame, I'm with Dragon Punch that this was legitimately the most forward thinking MMO gameplay I've had in years, but all of the surroundings got fucked.

Their marketing was atrocious (Convince everyone it's hardcore as fuck and you're not welcome unless you are so that everyone quits, ace), the early experience still panders to skillless morons, so anyone that is looking for something new quits before they see how fun the later/harder content is, the endgame was fun but designed poorly (attunements weren't hard but they're a chore, and raid size shenanigans basically guaranteed that almost nobody ever got past the 20 man, or most people even had a raid of 20 for that matter).

The worst part is that at the end of the day, most of what kept people away were misconceptions entirely, the actual endgame content was a blast and not THAT 'hardcore' by any stretch, the time commitment was basically the same as wow or FF14.

BnS is very fun in terms of combat, but the content isn't there. It's like every other asian MMO in that regard. Fun pvp though. BDO I haven't played but literally everyone everywhere has said there's just not a single thing to do once you're at the endgame.
 

~Cross~

Member
As long as they can tap the casual population, and not go overboard with the cash store pricing/screwage i think it will be okay, at least here in the West...

Without some HEAVY localization there wont be a way for BD to tap into the casual western market. Right now the korean versions end game is "Keep grinding after the soft cap and continue to power up your gear less you get completely destroyed by someone in PVP. "

There is no PVE content whatsoever other than a few world bosses, there is no structured pvp allowing peoples gear to normalize, and a single extremely farmed individual can take on dozens of people by himself without much effort. Not to mention how horribly balanced the classes are. There is no middle ground here, you have to stay at or ahead of the curve, less you be completely useless.

Now bringing it back to wildstar. NCsoft were beyond kind with the guys at Carbine.They saved the company when they were running out of funds to keep development, they tolerated a bunch of delays because management kept forcing redoes on content and then when everything falls apart they actually let them try to do a f2p transition. Sunk cost is a hell of a drug.

They could have brought B&S over here a whole lot faster with those resources and B&S makes enough money from Korea/China/Taiwan/Japan that they could run the B&S servers on a skeleton network, localization and cs crew and still get content financed by the asian versions.
 

Psyren

Member
Without some HEAVY localization there wont be a way for BD to tap into the casual western market. Right now the korean versions end game is "Keep grinding after the soft cap and continue to power up your gear less you get completely destroyed by someone in PVP. "

There is no PVE content whatsoever other than a few world bosses, there is no structured pvp allowing peoples gear to normalize, and a single extremely farmed individual can take on dozens of people by himself without much effort. Not to mention how horribly balanced the classes are. There is no middle ground here, you have to stay at or ahead of the curve, less you be completely useless.

Now bringing it back to wildstar. NCsoft were beyond kind with the guys at Carbine.They saved the company when they were running out of funds to keep development, they tolerated a bunch of delays because management kept forcing redoes on content and then when everything falls apart they actually let them try to do a f2p transition. Sunk cost is a hell of a drug.

They could have brought B&S over here a whole lot faster with those resources and B&S makes enough money from Korea/China/Taiwan/Japan that they could run the B&S servers on a skeleton network, localization and cs crew and still get content financed by the asian versions.

To be fair, i'm mildly interested in playing BDO because of the lack of endgame, and if they can do something in a similar vein to vanilla GW2 (endgame = grind for bling, cheevos, miscellaneous cosmetic crap), then it should keep my attention for a little while. If they can keep that going, and throw more random things into "the sandbox" for people to do, then i think it has a chance to hold its own. GW2 managed to survive fine on this content model, so i think this could too...

After all, most casuals don't give a shit about hardcore PvE content runs and/or PvP
 

Imbarkus

As Sartre noted in his contemplation on Hell in No Exit, the true horror is other members.
I think they misread it. If I understand it well, its 0 billion of korean won. Basically, it'll be under a billion so under 1 million dollars of revenue. But not near 0 dollars.

Now way Lineage I pulls in 66 billion in Q1. That's millions.

So I'm guessing Wildstar is projected to hit <$500,000 that quarter, and rounding down and showing millions with no decimals makes that 0.
 

ViciousDS

Banned
BnS is a big esport in Korea and it's like the 5th or 6th biggest game there right alongside Aion. It's not going anywhere no matter how much you seem to wish.

Also I played KR and NA CBT1 Black Desert. Imagine if they made a sandbox and forgot to put sand in and that's BDO. The character creator is insane though and it's very pretty. And yes, it's a sandbox, there is no PvE endgame whatsoever.

I was talking Western........Insanely huge difference.


Lineage 1 is huge still over in korea, along with Aion, and other mmo's that are not big over here. B&S will dwindle in the West to a few servers and probably have a small active population. Black Desert will survive on its hardcore PvP crowd, but will dwindle because its a real time version of Archeage.


The West mmo market is insanely different, the two most popular mmo's are WoW and FFXIV. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
 

Valkrai

Member
Wildstar is a good game, shame that the player count is so low. I stopped playing because it started getting boring and repetitive to me, that and the GAF guild never really played :/
 
They mismanaged the hell out of this game, folks have been calling this game getting potentially shut down for a while. A strong F2P launch and post launch could've breathed some life into the game but honestly the writing was on the wall.

How the hell is lineage 1 making SO MUCH money? I mean I can understand an old game still being popular, but the revenue is far, far beyond any other game listed.

If you follow the Korean gaming industry it's not that surprising really, there's a reason it's the WoW of Korea, it's NCSoft's golden goose. It's not a graphically intense game either which means it can run on toasters.
 

Apathy

Member
Ncsoft needs to stop shitting out MMOs and then just forgetting them. Just focus on 2 and grow them. It doesn't help that bandwagon supports claim every new thing that they release is a wow killer but either never stick around out there just isn't any real community support and it's just a few loud members
 

ShinMaruku

Member
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Time Will tell. But I think it's going to fade fast. I think most are just waiting for Black desert to launch or another mmo to receive there content update. B&S is just filler to probably quite a bit.

How many servers does B&S have?

Blade and Soul will be sustiatained because the people who want filler for Black desert are gonna get burnt worse than wildstar. To this topic I find it kinda apt that the pushed back blade and soul for this game for the west and to see it fail so spectacularly is something to learn from.
 
I think they misread it. If I understand it well, its 0 billion of korean won. Basically, it'll be under a billion so under 1 million dollars of revenue. But not near 0 dollars.

Typical monthly operating costs for an fully staffed MMO studio are somewhere around $1m-$3m. Per month. Generating less than $1m in revenue for a quarter might as well be $0.

I used to work at Carbine. This is not surprising at all. Place was a complete shit show.

I'm now trying to figure out who used to work there and liked hockey. (I also worked for Carbine - and it absolutely was a shit show.)
 
Just ask. It really is a shit show, they're hemorrhaging employees still and they have HR write positive reviews on Glassdoor.

Typical monthly operating costs for an fully staffed MMO studio are somewhere around $1m-$3m. Per month. Generating less than $1m in revenue for a quarter might as well be $0.



I'm now trying to figure out who used to work there and liked hockey. (I also worked for Carbine - and it absolutely was a shit show.)

What the hell happened with the launch of F2P? How did Carbine fuck it up that badly?
 
You mean to tell me that pandering exclusively to the extremely tiny subset of WoW players who deified the vanilla WoW days is NOT a sustainable business model??
 
What the hell happened with the launch of F2P? How did Carbine fuck it up that badly?

I left just before the F2P launch, so I don't know exactly what happened internally. But, I could have told you it was going to be a disaster due to how their development processes, QA (or lack thereof), and content release pipelines were setup.

I've worked on a few different MMOs, and each one has had its own quirks or weird development practices (RIFT, for example, didn't originally have costume options for NPCs - every single NPC in the game is a unique model with its armor/weapons baked into the model, which caused issues with the art pipeline and getting new assets) But Wildstar's lack of proper build branching, using Perforce for Art and Code assets but NOT game data, and having a 3 month turn around from 'content complete' sign off to release ensured that each patch was going to be an absolute disaster.

I can only assume that none of those were addressed prior to F2P and it killed them once again.

"If you aren't hardcore you shouldn't play our game pussies, this isn't your baby mmo. All the convenience you've come to expect from wow isn't here... Wait why is no one playing?"

For what it's worth, I absolutely hated the marketing they ran for initial launch. Couple the super-hardcore mantra that turned a lot of people off and pandered to (IMO) the worst demographic for MMOs with the fact that half the marketing blitz ran cute little Chuas that sent a really awkward mixed message about who the game was for and what the game was about.
 
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