I don't understand why this is hard to understand?
Pre-sales on GW2 was 250,000...CoH had 50,000 members but only 33,200 paying customers at shutdown...
NCSOft is not financially hurt either...those game sales are down...but Lineage (the first one) is in the Asian market and one of the top 10 games in the market currently as I write this...with more people playing Lineage than there are playing WoW...how are they hurting?
Your information is based on American market which has less than a million players while NCSoft is primarily Asian with a billion possible players...yes I said Billion...China alone has 1.1 Billion people...not including Korea (where the head company is), Vietnam, Japan and other markets.
I hate to burst your bubble, but more than 100 millions WoW accounts have been registered since it came out in 2004, top of that, WoW is still the World's most subscribed MMORPG... The Lineage Series has only attracted 43 Million players since the first Lineage came out 1998, So I highly doubt that there are more people playing Lineage than there are playing WoW unless Lineage 2 somehow has more than 5.5 Million Players with it's Free To Play model and no new expansions...
While yes, the Asian part of the Lineage 2 players practically throw their money down the drain on micro-transactions, it's not very plausible that there are enough players spending so much money for NCsoft to make money off of Lineage 2, I'd say that they're just getting the same amount of money that they spend keeping the servers up... Of course, I could be wrong, NCsoft could be making Bank off of all the money spent on micro-transactions but if that were the case, then they wouldn't be doing some of the things they've done in the past/are doing now
(Not trying to be rude here, but very few games can compete with WoW, even SWTOR wasn't able to really make a huge dent in WoW's subscriptions. The main reason WoW has lost people is because like me, they've gotten bored of the repetitive aspect of every single WoW expansion, or they just don't like WoW anymore, or both)
