For a company that's been operating in the red for 3 quarters straight, I'm surprised they could afford to buy these at all right now.
You're kidding right? As mentioned in the thread on their 4Q report and in the stock watch thread, NCsoft is swimming in cash. In the last report they listed roughly $500M in liquid assets (cash, equivalents, financial instruments and accounts receivable). After two quarters of GW2 sales they've been hunting high and low for ways to invest the money instead of giving it to various governments.
Also, the consolidated companies (that is, NCsoft and all their subsidiaries) showed around a $150M net income for 2012 (I'm not actually checking exchange rates, so that's just a ball park figure). About 2/3rds of that was from the last quarter. So you're way off with the implication that they're bleeding cash.
Lastly, even with the parent company showing red ink for the 4Q, they weren't actually
operating in the red; they had about a $20M net operating profit after taxes. The reason for the red ink on the bottom line was that they spent so much on non-operational expenses such as a baseball team and because they shuffled money off the parent's books by capitalizing a new American subsidiary.
Let's not delude ourselves into believing NCsoft is failing as a business. They aren't. They suck to do business with, but unfortunately they aren't being penalized for that by short-sighted customers.