120838-kdb-daewoo-securities-ncsoft-2015-forecast

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No mention of Wildstar at all in KDB Daewoo Securities forecast for NCsoft in 2015, and depressingly small revenue forecast too. Makes a Wildstar fan like me sad.
 
http://www.kdbdw.com/bbs/download/192028.pdf?attachmentId=192028	
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			well we do have 2 out of 4 megaservers almost completely dead. Unless something drastic happens I don't expect a population climb. 	
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			It's on the charts where it belongs. It isn't on a number of them because it hasn't been out for over a year. There is forecasting for this year which shows lower expectations, but flat over the year. Of course how can you do a long term forecast with so little past data. Which in a way is good for W*, because lower expectations mean even small growth looks better.	
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Forecasts make no claim at being perfectly accurate. They're models based on aggregate data from lots of prior businesses and games and how they perform. What the forecast should tell us all is that the game's current course is unlikely to be sustainable as anything but a one-server game with little or no revenue to justify further development.
 
Fortunately, the game is changing course. Whether it will be enough to change the projection remains an open question. Given how slowly they're turning the boat and how small the adjustments are to the things that I perceive as most important to change, I will admit to some skepticism at the same time that I hope that I'm wrong.	
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			Whatever happens NCsoft is a wild card. They pull the plugs of games the moment "x" game is not part of their future plans.	
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Population will be on a slow decline until they put in a free trial. It's just impossible to get people to buy an "unknown ded gaem" like many say it is. It has already been 7 months so no idea why carbine / NCSoft still hold it.
 
And no, that trial key system for players who bought it isn't a free trial. Specially not when you can get banned over what the trial player does. Even if you had endless supply of those keys at a 3rd party website there would still be hundreds of thousands of players who couldn't either find it or cba to find one.
 
(just remember what happened to DOTA 2, for the last 1-2 months of the "closed" beta every player had 50-100 invites to hand out and different sites gave free invites to anyone who wanted to go. So what happened when it went into official open beta? They had hundreds of thousands of new players to try it. No matter how "accessible" the keys are they will never match the "PLAY HERE" button on the front page)	
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			At this point all we can do is hope for gear power creep to make the content more accessible and a F2P model as soon as possible. 	
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No matter how "accessible" the keys are they will never match the "PLAY HERE" button on the front page
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At this point all we can do is hope for gear power creep to make the content more accessible and a F2P model as soon as possible. 
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Population will be on a slow decline until they put in a free trial. It's just impossible to get people to buy an "unknown ded gaem" like many say it is. It has already been 7 months so no idea why carbine / NCSoft still hold it.
 
And no, that trial key system for players who bought it isn't a free trial. Specially not when you can get banned over what the trial player does. Even if you had endless supply of those keys at a 3rd party website there would still be hundreds of thousands of players who couldn't either find it or cba to find one.
 
(just remember what happened to DOTA 2, for the last 1-2 months of the "closed" beta every player had 50-100 invites to hand out and different sites gave free invites to anyone who wanted to go. So what happened when it went into official open beta? They had hundreds of thousands of new players to try it. No matter how "accessible" the keys are they will never match the "PLAY HERE" button on the front page)
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-there is just not enough content in wildstar or not enough good content. 4 dungeons? lol
-there is no content scaling in wildstar, so you have no reason to revisit anything once you are 50 and possibly raiding
-pvp based on gear, with that gear locked behind a rating, that you can get by playing rated matches that dont happen or win trading ? fail.
-daily zones? pathetic relic of the past that even swtor is dropping. make dailies more varied like in gw2 and teso (do that dungeon, kill that world boss, etc...) obviously it is more difficult to achieve because there is no content scaling and there is barely no content at endgame but hey.. worth a shot.
-no reason to level up an alt. with so much grind, you have to be crazy to have an alt. make a lot more things account bound.
-clusterfk pvp. 10vs10 is a mess. make it 5v5. and the UI is cluttered with so many lame addons and stuff. nobody will ever watch that on twitch and youtube: wildstar is UGLY. gw2 doesn't need addons. dota/lol don't need addons. what the fck are these? addons? you must fk up your game to be functional? lame.
 
anyway.. wildstar is just a relic. it is badly designed on so many levels.
 
my forecast: game will never turn in a profit. take your money away from that.	
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Population will be on a slow decline until they put in a free trial. It's just impossible to get people to buy an "unknown ded gaem" like many say it is. It has already been 7 months so no idea why carbine / NCSoft still hold it.
 
And no, that trial key system for players who bought it isn't a free trial. Specially not when you can get banned over what the trial player does. Even if you had endless supply of those keys at a 3rd party website there would still be hundreds of thousands of players who couldn't either find it or cba to find one.
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Forecasts make no claim at being perfectly accurate. They're models based on aggregate data from lots of prior businesses and games and how they perform. What the forecast should tell us all is that the game's current course is unlikely to be sustainable as anything but a one-server game with little or no revenue to justify further development.
 
Fortunately, the game is changing course. Whether it will be enough to change the projection remains an open question. Given how slowly they're turning the boat and how small the adjustments are to the things that I perceive as most important to change, I will admit to some skepticism at the same time that I hope that I'm wrong.
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At this point all we can do is hope for gear power creep to make the content more accessible and a F2P model as soon as possible.
 
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{| class="blockquote"
Forecasts make no claim at being perfectly accurate. They're models based on aggregate data from lots of prior businesses and games and how they perform. What the forecast should tell us all is that the game's current course is unlikely to be sustainable as anything but a one-server game with little or no revenue to justify further development.
 
Fortunately, the game is changing course. Whether it will be enough to change the projection remains an open question. Given how slowly they're turning the boat and how small the adjustments are to the things that I perceive as most important to change, I will admit to some skepticism at the same time that I hope that I'm wrong.
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Ya this is the take-away I get from the forecast "in a vacuum" as well. If they do nothing different the forecast is somewhat grim.  I mean I guess it's ok (not really) that for their 2015 forecast WS is basically flat?  Better flat than negative I suppose.
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I don't know how NCSoft runs their business and determines the forecast of a currently unforecastable game, but these could be values that are inserted to represent the "if nothing happen" scenario. On the other hand these could be values representing "base line" or "no data exists, fill with trends of other similar games". Without knowledge in how they do business speculating at what these numbers represent is just speculation. 
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Q4 earnings report should be out in the next 4 weeks. Will give real numbers to attribute to the decline seen in game.
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