quarterly reports posts

Making/Money: EVE Economic Review Reviewed

by Alexis Kassan Nov 17th 2008 at 10:00AM

Filed under: EVE Online, Economy, Making/Money

Each quarter, the economist over at EVE Online, Dr. Eyjolfur Gudmondsson (there are supposed to be accent marks in there but I can't figure out how to make them appear), writes up a review of the in-game economy. There has been a noticeable lag in times past between the schedule for these quarterly newsletters and when they were actually distributed. October saw the release of the Quarterly Economic Newsletter for Q1 of this year and the promise of QENs for quarters 2 and 3 to follow in November and December, respectively.

Today, we'll take a look through what Dr. Gundmondsson has to say about the economy from January to March. I do encourage you to look through the PDF of the QEN for yourself ... and just ignore that they talk about June 2008 in future tense.

Tags: economics, economy, eve-online, featured, joystiqfeatures, newsletter, quarterly reports, QuarterlyReports

Funcom quarterly report reveals Age of Conan performance

by Adrian Bott Aug 15th 2008 at 12:30PM

Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, MMO industry

We covered the NCsoft quarterly report two days ago; now it's Funcom's turn. Many gamers will be keenly interested to know what the truth of Age of Conan's performance really is, what with nay-sayers taking delight in talking it down and representatives and supporters talking it up. The game is either thriving, or dying on its backside. People are leaving in droves; whole guilds are untouched and continue to play on busy servers. AoC sucks; AoC rules. What do the figures say?

As it turns out, we have to distinguish between the report presentation - a colorful package that includes lots of celebratory marketing woo-woo material - and the financial report itself. If one looks at the report presentation as opposed to the financial report, it appears the game sold over 800,000 copies to date and currently (that is, 'per August 14') has 415,000 customers. That many subscribers would certainly be enough to keep the game alive and healthy. But there's a big twist around the corner.

Tags: age-of-conan, aoc, funcom, quarterly, quarterly reports, QuarterlyReports

NCsoft quarterly report shows overall drop in profits, but some good news

by Adrian Bott Aug 13th 2008 at 10:00AM

Filed under: MMO industry

The NCsoft quarterly report is now available, and as usual it makes for compelling reading. Net sales are down, expenses up: overall, it's not been a good quarter for the company, but there are positive elements.

A look at the specific games tells an interesting story. Guild Wars shows a sharp drop in online sales, plunging by 46%, which may simply be due to anticipation of Guild Wars II.

Online sales of Lineage and Lineage II, the major earners outside Europe and the US, are slightly down, presumably due to age-related falloff, while online sales of Tabula Rasa and CoX are up, the former jumping by 7%. Though online sales earnings from Tabula Rasa are still the lowest of the named games, bringing in only 2,007 million Won as compared to the 5,743 and 5,096 of CoX and Guild Wars respectively, players will be glad to know they have shown an increase.

Tags: aion, city-of-heroes, city-of-villains, coh, cov, cox, guild-wars, guild-wars-2, lineage, lineage-2, ncsoft, quarterly, quarterly reports, QuarterlyReports, tabula-rasa