There was some talk in another thread about how the exchange rate may have affected what the NCSoft mothership thought about the success of the game.
Now I posted the relevant numbers from the spreadsheet I put together after the closure announcement but a list of numbers is rather, abstract.
Q2 2004 11135 1161.21 $9.589
Q3 2004 9403 1153.77 $8.150
Q4 2004 10937 1084.59 $10.084
Q1 2005 6341 1020.28 $6.215
Q2 2005 5806 1006.62 $5.768
Q3 2005 6412 1027.84 $6.238
Q4 2005 15706 1029.57 $15.255
Q1 2006 6523 961.633 $6.783
Q2 2006 5532 935.032 $5.916
Q3 2006 7429 940.203 $7.901
Q4 2006 5532 924.872 $5.981
Q1 2007 5954 924.36 $6.441
Q2 2007 6370 922.454 $6.905
Q3 2007 5721 924.968 $6.185
Q4 2007 5401 919.505 $5.874
Q1 2008 5416 952.842 $5.684
Q2 2008 5743 1015.58 $5.655
Q3 2008 6193 1060.2 $5.841
Q4 2008 6835 1355.91 $5.041
Q1 2009 6837 1409.81 $4.850
Q2 2009 6673 1283.09 $5.201
Q3 2009 5471 1236.44 $4.425
Q4 2009 3928 1164.46 $3.373
Q1 2010 3348 1140.89 $2.935
Q2 2010 3491 1160.81 $3.007
Q3 2010 5709 1180.94 $4.834
Q4 2010 3239 1130.23 $2.866
Q1 2011 3051 1117.46 $2.730
Q2 2011 2787 1081.89 $2.576
Q3 2011 2812 1079.47 $2.605
Q4 2011 3435 1144.09 $3.002
Q1 2012 2890 1129.19 $2.559
Q2 2012 2855 1149.05 $2.485
And it sort of causes your eyes to gloss over doesn't it. I'm more of a visual person so this is what I did. I scaled the quarterly amounts relative to the first quarter of the game, in KrW and USD, to 100 and then plotted them.
The red line is the relative sales per quarter in USD, green in KrW. The first spike is the game's first Christmas Holiday season, the next is CoV hitting the stores, the one in Q3 2006 I'll get back to and lastly the release of GR.
Now the GvE pack came out at the end of Sept 2006, the tail end of Q3. Now the box was originally only available in Walmart for the first 90 days and many didn't have it on the shelf until well into Q4. It could be players buying the GvE goodie pack for $10 causing the surge. Maybe there was an upswing in sales due to X-men 3 and Superman Returns over the summer. Don't know.
A threw together a second chart. It's the trailing twelve months of sales, previous 4 quarters, to look at the "annual" sales trends. The first 12 months is used to scale the rest, again from 100.
In both cases what is obvious is for about four years after the game first came out, the dollar weakened/KrW strengthened which depressed the sales earnings from the PoV of Korea. Now in 2008 the value of the KrW collapsed going from around 920 to a dollar to 1410 to a dollar a year or so later. That's a 50% difference. That's why the game's sales revenues in KrW surged in 2008. What followed was Korea's central bank stepping in to stabilize it by the end of 2009 to around the same level as it is today and back when the game first came out (1150 +/- 70).
Now this made it look like the game's sales also collapsed significantly in 2009 from 70% of first year sales to 40%, where in reality, from a dollar perspective, have been on a steady decline for nearly 3 years. The plateau is caused by the surge of GR sales and when that ran it's course in the TTM number it plateaued again at around 30% of the games first 12 months of sales.
Over the last two 1/2 years the exchange rate didn't hide the state of sales of the game from it's masters. In the first four years the exchange rate depressed the state of sales followed by a year of so of false growth and rapid decline. Now if any of that was factored into their decision making, who knows.