Why the game was shut down
A few people were asking "Why?" and someone on SomethingAwful posted the sales numbers, pulled from NCSoft's financial filings from the last few years:
Those numbers are in KRW, but to give you an idea in USD, 2855 million KRW is worth $2,569,500 for three months, meaning the game was generating a bit over $10M in sales a year. Not profits, sales. If they let go of about 50 employees, figuring an average salary of $75K each, on average, that's almost 40% of their income, and that doesn't include server costs, maintenance, rent, power, etc. And, remember, they're based in northern California, and it's a largely technical staff, so that might be estimating low. If it was making a profit, it was a very narrow one.
Here's a link to a graphic of that data. The first big spike was the release of Going Rogue. The second, much smaller, one was the transition to F2P.
So there you go. There's your why. It's unfortunate, but it's also pretty easy to understand.
- 1Q 08: 5416
- 2Q 08: 5743
- 3Q 08: 6193
- 4Q 08: 6865
- 1Q 09: 6837
- 2Q 09: 6673
- 3Q 09: 5471
- 4Q 09: 3928
- 1Q 10: 3348
- 2Q 10: 3491
- 3Q 10: 5709
- 4Q 10: 3239
- 1Q 11: 3051
- 2Q 11: 2787
- 3Q 11: 2812
- 4Q 11: 3435
- 1Q 12: 2890
- 2Q 12: 2855
Those numbers are in KRW, but to give you an idea in USD, 2855 million KRW is worth $2,569,500 for three months, meaning the game was generating a bit over $10M in sales a year. Not profits, sales. If they let go of about 50 employees, figuring an average salary of $75K each, on average, that's almost 40% of their income, and that doesn't include server costs, maintenance, rent, power, etc. And, remember, they're based in northern California, and it's a largely technical staff, so that might be estimating low. If it was making a profit, it was a very narrow one.
Here's a link to a graphic of that data. The first big spike was the release of Going Rogue. The second, much smaller, one was the transition to F2P.
So there you go. There's your why. It's unfortunate, but it's also pretty easy to understand.