http://www.aionsource.com/forum/news-announcements/34822-ncsofts-q2-profits-jump-451-a.html

"From www.industrygamers.com

NCsoft just lost two key people in the West, but its business overall is going strong. Today the Korean MMO publisher announced its second-quarter and first-half earnings, noting that net income was up a whopping 451% in Q2, totaling 33.75 billion Korean won (US$27.3 million). Sales were up 70% to 137.77 billion Korean won. Operating profit was also way up, climbing 353% to 47.5 billion won

Aion, which launched last November in Korea and this July in Japan and Taiwan, brought in 40.6 billion Korean won. Lineage II wasn't far behind, generating 37.36 billion Korean won, followed by the first Lineage at 27.48 billion Korean won. City of Heroes, City of Villains, Guild Wars and others made up the remaining sales.

Thanks to the company's strong performances in the first couple quarters, NCsoft also raised its outlook for the full year to 586 billion Korean won ($470 million) in sales and 180 billion won ($144 million) in operating profit."


Yeah Aion is totally not doing well in the east. Not at all.

To bad your math skills suck as badly as blizzards do, they fluff subs in the millions, does everyone nowadays count free trials and dead accounts as subs? Seems so. EVE with 300k subs, a pure joke. Even at peak times EVE cant break 70k.

@Graill Too bad you live in a world populated by your own delusions. Blizzard's been very clear about how they calculate their numbers, and they've never included trials or lapsed subscriptions. And your silly jab at Eve just makes you look foolish -- the number of people online at any given time has nothing to do with how many active subscriptions exist.

EVE doesn't exactly have a firm number 2 position...there are a couple titles that are colse enough to surpass it in the US market. Counting Aion out is foolish.

From what I've seen of Aion, I think it has the mass-market apeal that WoW does (some will be turned off by the anime-esque styling, but many WoW geeks like anime...). It also looks good, and runs well on older systems (not quite as old as WoW, but it does a very good job). The marketing push is also definately there as well, and they have a lot of hype going for it. Hype will often kill a MMO out the gate that isn't ready, but with Aion having been out in Korea nearly a year, it is very polished and feels like a retail product already, much moreso than any other MMO I have tried in recent years.

Remember games like Warhammer Online actually sold 800k copies, but they didn't stick around because the game was ultimately repetitive and unstable in high-end PvP. If Asia is any indicator, Aion is not a poor game. The only question is whether or not it will be as well recieved in the western market...and I think it will.

First IF you would have READ the 2nd quarter results of NCSoft, you would have seen that the "massively and newly launched success" of Aion hardly made more money ... than Lineage 2, which has ... 60K subs in the west. See you own text please....

Add the newly sold copies of a new launched product and the subscriptions hardly went anywhere the moment the free launch Beta period in China was over.

NO more subs mentioned also in thet quarter report. Wouldn't it be nice to talk about the so called millions of Aion players JUST before the western launch ???

The fact remains that the Chinese only went massively to the free Beta, but the moment Aion became a paid servcie in China the numbers weren't as great as the launching hype.

NCSoft made exactly the same wind with Lineage (supposed millions at launch in the east !) and the game has hardly any western subs (60K).

So much for the soulless .Korean copy.

Another dud in MMO land.
How many more Wow copies do we need before the money runs to our pockets run dry of inferior products....

You need to remember, WAR, AoC, and Darkfall didn't have the chance to be released a year beforehand in another country. Aion has a huge background in Korea and China. All these games you have mentioned have failed in terms of not updating, not keeping the community updated, and failing to meet the communities need. In which the Aion team has ALREADY done for a year.

Yes, Venekor stated it ...Aion will be stymied by homophobes.

/rolleyes

WoW is dieing? Where is the evidence for this? Last I checked it keeps growing and growing.

You wait and see - the Blizzard empire will bite back with their announcements of new features, raids and expansions at Blizzcon at the end of the month and people will keep playing.

It's just the drones from the WoW fan base coming in to bitch like they do on the main forums and wow.com.

Yeah. Give the game a chance. It has some features that could end up being way more awesome than WoW's at its current stage. I currently play WoW and have for 2.5 years or so, and I truly hope that Aion will be better so I will switch over.

I can almost guarentee you havent played the game. Eastern Market graphics? I almost fell off my chair laughing.

Gameplay? The game play is smooth and the animations are unbelieveable.

Time investment? Is this an mmo? Because every mmo includes time investment. And don't even try to say it's a grindfest because it's being completely altered from the Eastern version.

For sure!

F**k NC SOFT...

Tabula Rasa was a fantastic game that had real potential but they muffed it up.. I won't be investing any money or time into any more of their games..

DIACF

"Gameplay? The game play is smooth and the animations are unbelieveable."

Those are graphical features, not gameplay features. I believe he was (poorly) trying to say that playing Lineage 2 isn't very fun, not even when you make it look pretty, add wings, and put in some fairly generic quests to make grinding seem less like grinding.