NCsoft Corporation to Sell Entire Shares of NC Interactive Inc.

[Memorandum]

Does Guild Wars 2 sell well in Korea and Asia, or only mainly in NA and EU?  I thought the Asians were big into it too; GW1 was overrun with Koreans in the arenas back when it first came out anyway.  I mean, why mess with success, especially so early on in GW2's lifespan.  I'd imagine there are several expansions planned already.

 

They just published an info about banning 34.000 botter accounts, so actually I think there is no Asian left.

 

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/mike-lewis-on-the-war-against-the-bots/

[Lily Barclay]

It boggles the mind as to why they would shut down half of their western profits before starting a new company to handle that market. Seems like they are shooting themselves in the foot or purposely trying to make that company fail. I just don't get it.

[Ironwolf]

Well they figure the world is ending in 8 days so lets get rid of the Yankee dogs.

[Electro]

It boggles the mind as to why they would shut down half of their western profits before starting a new company to handle that market. Seems like they are shooting themselves in the foot or purposely trying to make that company fail. I just don't get it.

Maybe they learned from the City of Heroes incident that they really don't know jack shit about the Western market.  This would be perhaps an emergency reaction to (1) major negative public feedback from the way CoH was closed, and (2) their stock prices hit an even new low.

[Manga]

Yeah... which only helps reinforce my suspicion that the killing of PS/CoH had more to do with spite and malice than any sort of cold-blooded business decision.

I've long had a guess that Paragon was shut down because one person there didn't follow an explicit order from NCSoft corporate.  Could have been an order to meet an unrealistic sales forecast by a certain date, and Paragon almost made it but not quite.  Could have been that, and NC changed its mind and said it's not enough, you're gone anyhow.  Could have been a staffing requirement Paragon thought was open for debate.

Either way, because of the way the announcement was handled, and the business manager's reaction, I get the distinct feeling that Paragon was indeed shut down out of spite.  Like an exec sacrificing it to show other subsidiaries that their orders are not flexible, and not up for debate.  At least in part, anyway (because being the most expensive game to run, it's easy to justify punishing Paragon from a stockholder point of view).

Made sense even more during the buyout negotiations because of NC throwing in ridiculous demands just to humiliate the Paragon business manager when they had no intention to sell.  It's like they were driving home their point again; you defied us, and now you, all of your co-workers, and all your players must pay.

[therain93]

I would just like to point out that tax evasion (illegal) and tax avoidance (legal) are two separate things. Local, national, and international companies do have to strategize on how to best organize themselves such that they aren't unnecessarily taxed and they pay tremendous amounts of money to firms like PWC (Price, Waterhouse, and Coopers), Deloitte, KPMG, and E&Y (Ernst and Young), among others, to figure that out -- it's not something that a firm typically does on its own.  Those firms have dedicated accounting consultant divisions/firms for this type of work, aside from preparing returns.  In addition, they provide auditing services and it is typical that if the firm is providing tax accounting work, then they cannot do the auditing (conflict of interest).  In the case of NCsoft, it appears that they've retained Deloitte for that auditing piece (since Deloitte prepared the 2011 independent audit); please note, the accounting prep part can be confidential, at least the firm can't disclose NCsoft as a client.

All of this, the accounting and organization piece, is highly (HIGHLY) regulated and the fact that they have Deloitte doing the auditng should be an indicator of a relatively high level of legitimacy.  For those calling shenanigans and fantasizing about prosecuting, I'm just trying to temper expectations.  Yes, the timing is "interesting", but please don't pin all of your hopes on this.

[Surelle]

It boggles the mind as to why they would shut down half of their western profits before starting a new company to handle that market. Seems like they are shooting themselves in the foot or purposely trying to make that company fail. I just don't get it.

Didn't CoH report directly to NCSoft Korea, instead of reporting to NCWest like Aion NA, the Guild Wars franchise and Lineage 2 NA do?  If so, maybe once they got the idea for this new wholly-owned subsidiary deal going, they shut CoH down so it wouldn't impede the transfer of NCInteractive?  It would certainly somewhat explain their knee-jerk, brutal closure of CoH out of nowhere.  It wouldn't justify any of it to be sure, but it would explain why it happened how it happened to a degree.

[Lorraine1000]

Didn't CoH report directly to NCSoft Korea, instead of reporting to NCWest like Aion NA, the Guild Wars franchise and Lineage 2 NA do?  If so, maybe once they got the idea for this new wholly-owned subsidiary deal going, they shut CoH down so it wouldn't impede the transfer of NCInteractive?  It would certainly somewhat explain their knee-jerk, brutal closure of CoH out of nowhere.  It wouldn't justify any of it to be sure, but it would explain why it happened how it happened to a degree.

I was thinking this.

[Manga]

Didn't CoH report directly to NCSoft Korea, instead of reporting to NCWest like Aion NA, the Guild Wars franchise and Lineage 2 NA do?  If so, maybe once they got the idea for this new wholly-owned subsidiary deal going, they shut CoH down so it wouldn't impede the transfer of NCInteractive?  It would certainly somewhat explain their knee-jerk, brutal closure of CoH out of nowhere.  It wouldn't justify any of it to be sure, but it would explain why it happened how it happened to a degree.

Doesn't work, because they could have just as easily still closed Paragon, but transferred CoH itself to the new division.  They did it before actually - Paragon used to be part of NCSoft West.

[srmalloy]

That changes everything.  They shoulda just said 50.5 billion and then I wouldn't have been stupid.

It's an artifact of there being two different numbering systems, the 'short scale' and the 'long scale'. In the short scale system, each named unit is 1,000 times the next lower unit -- so a million is 1,000,000, a billion is 1,000,000,000, a trillion is 1,000,000,000,000, etc. -- while in the long scale system, each named unit is 1,000,000 times the next lower unit -- so a million is still 1,000,000, but a billion is 1,000,000,000,000 and a trillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. (in the long scale system, a thousand million is a 'milliard', which was later extended by construction of a 'billiard' being a thousand billion and a 'trilliard' being a thousand trillion.

Reporting a number as 50,500 million avoids confusion over the base unit in countries that use the long scale system, although that usage introduces an additional complication -- in Europe, Russia, South America, and several other countries, the decimal separator is a comma, which makes "50,500" read as 'fifty and one half', not 'fifty thousand five hundred'.

[srmalloy]

For the record, this has not escaped my attention, but I literally just found out about it.  I don't know exactly what it means, I'm still working on parsing it and figuring out what's going on.  Obviously, if this presents an opportunity for City of Heroes to be acquired by a third party, we will be all over it.  If not, we'll still keep on keepin' on.

Not only that, it gives additional leverage in that City of Heroes has to be only a part of the value of NCSoft Interactive, placing a pretty solid upper limit on the price they can set on the IP and not get laughed away from the bargaining table as being utterly clueless and out of touch with reality.

[srmalloy]

1.  It's pretty likely this means everyone working for NCSoft or Arenanet outside of Korea are now fired.

Not now. If they're following Korean practice, the pink slips will fall out of the sky unannounced on the 21st, with the new company forming on the following Monday, possibly with covert offers to 'critical' employees for jobs in the 'new' company.

[Lorraine1000]

Just as the statement posted by Kromede stated - This has NO effect on NCWest, Carbine, or Arena Net, or any of our games that are live or in development. Key words - no effect.

As someone stated above - this is paperwork basically. At the bottom of all of our webpages you will notice the copyright for NC Interactive - that's us - what we normally refer to NCWest. We are *already* a wholly-owned subsidary - have been since 2000, when we launched Lineage in beta. All this does is that the shares will be held differently. The article in Reuters makes it out to sound like something totally different. Honestly, we were surprised to see this sort of news about it, because its truly not very newsworthy at all. Since it has been stressed to us that this is in effect a "no change" I do not believe that this will affect Aion EU, but we have no official statement regarding that.

this is what Nyx has just said over on aion NA forums today

[Atlantea]

I'll tell you what it DID do - it either fooled a bunch of people into buying their stock, or that stock jump is THEM buying their own stock.

[Lorraine1000]

I'll tell you what it DID do - it either fooled a bunch of people into buying their stock, or that stock jump is THEM buying their own stock.

yes there stock jump was big after this was released.

[Illusionss]

I'll tell you what it DID do - it either fooled a bunch of people into buying their stock, or that stock jump is THEM buying their own stock.

I think they are buying their own stock. Unscientific opinion: I just have this funny feeling that its them. There is something just toooooo squirrelly about all this.

Will wait to see what happens over about the next six months or so.

[Starsman]

First, Brits can't count! <does neener-neener dance>

Good thing I'm not a brit (and C was added for fun, not a real thought in a final edit :p)

[Atlantea]

Some interesting posts on Facebook.

ok.. this one is new.. they closed at 149K on Friday, and opened at 152.5K on Monday morning.. meaning someone bought some shares over the weekend, and a LOT of shares. Their volume also increased at the same time, meaning that people are offloading shares (ie, there's more available on the market), yet the price has creeped up another 6500. This is not a stable share by any stretch of the means, and I'm wondering if the Korean markets are in the know of something we don't know. Anyone have the stock information on Nexon?

[/b]

price up 500, but volume down over 100K from yesterday.. someone's buying up the stock in massive quantities.. I'd wager we'll see a take-over notice in the papers soon!

possible, it could be part of the reason why Paragon and NCSoft in Seattle were closed down or downsized. Getting rid of overhead to make the company an attractive buy. Or NCSoft could be buying back their outstanding shares in an attempt to drive the price back up. Who knows?

I'd wager it was the first part.. or actually their attempt at keeping some money in house, which is a really dumb move since CoX was making money. The thought of them buying their own stocks doesn't make sense if their loosing money to me. I'd say someone's getting antsy to own that nifty NCSoft logo and take over their more investible properties.

Volume is not particularly high. Market analysis is tricky. If you look at a graph it can start to repeat the shapes. OR NOT. If it repeats it will be bumpy (up and down) a while longer then bump down. To understand when/if that will happen you need to look at financial repaort, etc. Avoid the CEO statement, unless you just wanta laugh.

Someone pushed the stock prices up a bit on Friday with a massive last minute buy of over 2/3rd's of the available stock, which means they've got really deep pockets. THis latest bump looks like some investors are offloading.. we'll see how far it tanks tomorrow and how the volume looks... but it's obvious someone is buying up shares in large amounts here and there.. letting the price settle.. then buying again.. it's a typical buyout strategy for when you want controlling interest of a company. and.. just an FYI.. 170K stocks is less than 1% of NCSoft's available, so it's not even a voting stake in the company.

C, Kris.... I believe you are right in someone is intentionally driving down the stock and purchasing it at rock bottom prices. I hope that when Nexon takes over NCSoft they decide to sell NC's titles that don't fit into their micropay/microtime scale and I hope another company snatches up CoH

Sadly, NCSoft's stock went WAY up today as a result of this... (I figured it would...) Sigh...

price goes up AND volume goes up? THat's some serious market manipulation there. Volume is shares AVAILABLE to purchase, when the volume goes up, the price generally DROPS. Seeing the volume AND the price go up is a serious sign of market-manipulation. It's based on supply and demand.. you don't see the price of tofu going up because someone made a bunch more of it. Just basic business sense says that something seriously fishy is going on here.

Even with the price going up 5k, it is still hovering a the bottom of the scale. I think they are setting themselves up purposefully for a Nexon buyout/takeover, so the execs who will surely be fired by shareholders can sell they're stock at a major profit after the takeover/during the takeover, Oppan Enron Style...

Today.. Stocks up 9K to 155K, Volume UP 30K to 410K shares available... yeah.. this is the exec's looking to dump out FAST, I'm not buying that media blitz about them opening up a North American company either, the only way that happens is with COST, which drives stock prices and volume DOWN, not up.

[/size]

[FatherXmas]

Didn't CoH report directly to NCSoft Korea, instead of reporting to NCWest like Aion NA, the Guild Wars franchise and Lineage 2 NA do?  If so, maybe once they got the idea for this new wholly-owned subsidiary deal going, they shut CoH down so it wouldn't impede the transfer of NCInteractive?  It would certainly somewhat explain their knee-jerk, brutal closure of CoH out of nowhere.  It wouldn't justify any of it to be sure, but it would explain why it happened how it happened to a degree.

No, Carbine reported to NCSoft Korea, Paragon reported to NC Interactive.  At least according to the last org chart NCSoft released.

[Kistulot]

Reading this thread makes me think of an exchange from the Simpsons.


"Mom, is dad gonna kill us?"
"We're just gonna have to wait and see."