NCsoft Seattle offices undergoing “realignment”

[Starsman]

ArenaNet owns the IP to Guild Wars, NCsoft handles the production side of things - or vice versa. But if NCsoft decided to shut down the game, ArenaNet has first crack at buying it back themselves.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

It is my understanding that NCSoft aquired ArenaNet last year. They are as likely to be able to buy anything back and regain independence as Paragon Studios was. Actually... less. Guild Wars 2 was a huge success. There is absolute zero chance they will sell or license the GW1 IP to anyone as long as they decide to keep GW2 running.

If I'm missing somethinghere, I would love to know what it is.

[Segev]

It is my understanding that NCSoft aquired ArenaNet last year. They are as likely to be able to buy anything back and regain independence as Paragon Studios was. Actually... less. Guild Wars 2 was a huge success. There is absolute zero chance they will sell or license the GW1 IP to anyone as long as they decide to keep GW2 running.

If I'm missing somethinghere, I would love to know what it is.

I've seen it stated a few times around here - without knowing for certain that the people making the statements are in fact correct - that Areanet has as part of its contract that governs NCSoft's acquisition of them that, should NCSoft wish to terminate its ownership of Areanet, Areanet has the right to buy itself - and all relevant IP - back from NCSoft.

[Starsman]

Frankly, I've been expecting this since I heard that Paragon was being shut down.

Sucks for the employees in Seattle, but I really believe that NCSoft's strategy that they're "realigning" into involves shutting down all development and support outside of the corporate office. NC Interactive and its subsidiaries are the first target, maybe because of internal politics, maybe not. Any branches will be either closed or turned into skeleton publishing arms to support titles developed in Seoul. I'd expect Carbine to be next on the chopping block, probably in a year once Wildstar is out the door.

The only possible exception is ArenaNet, but I don't believe even they are completely safe.

You know, I was thinking about this and to be devil's advocate (and lord I don't want to defend this company for any reason!) most MMO teams get heavily downsized either immediately after launch or a few months soon after once all big bugs and issues are addressed. Fact is you need a way smaller team to run an MMO than to start it up (unless you want to work into paid expansions ASAP.)

It happened to CoH after every expansion release and it has happened to almost every MMO out there. The only big difference is how it's managed. Usually a large chunk of the team gets reallocated to other projects or titles. NCSoft has a mess in the US, they have studios split all over. They never consolidated things neatly in a single state like SoE did, so moving team from one studio to the other is not trivial, and much cheaper to just hire local talent than paying relocation costs.

My immediate guess: they want a localization team working on B&S now, but can't afford hiring people, nor moving people over to the studio. They may also want to refocus some of the west branch budget into speeding up Wildstar's development. Since GW2 is done and stable, it's time to "realign focus"

[Starsman]

I've seen it stated a few times around here - without knowing for certain that the people making the statements are in fact correct - that Areanet has as part of its contract that governs NCSoft's acquisition of them that, should NCSoft wish to terminate its ownership of Areanet, Areanet has the right to buy itself - and all relevant IP - back from NCSoft.

I see. Would be interesting to see how that contract is worded, because there can be an insane number of loopholes, like "we are not terminating our ownership... we just want to relocate the studio to Korea, so you either come with us or you quit!"

[dwturducken]

I've seen it stated a few times around here - without knowing for certain that the people making the statements are in fact correct - that Areanet has as part of its contract that governs NCSoft's acquisition of them that, should NCSoft wish to terminate its ownership of Areanet, Areanet has the right to buy itself - and all relevant IP - back from NCSoft.

The right to buy it won't automatically mean they can buy it, as we saw with our game.

[Manga]

I've seen it stated a few times around here - without knowing for certain that the people making the statements are in fact correct - that Areanet has as part of its contract that governs NCSoft's acquisition of them that, should NCSoft wish to terminate its ownership of Areanet, Areanet has the right to buy itself - and all relevant IP - back from NCSoft.

I believe NCSoft *is* trying to remove its entire presence in North America, and centralize in Korea.  I'm not sure what will happen to Guild Wars 2, but it's likely if you're a player of any of their games from the U.S., you'll have to look forward to almost no support (the support crew would be centralized in Korea too), servers located in Korea - creating connection problems for players of games like Aion and GW2, as well as weird maintenance windows - and slow future development, since Korean language versions would be released first.

The only positive to GW2 is it's relatively independent, and they can search for a new publisher, or go independent, if they don't like the new terms (very likely that all servers and support will be relocated to Korea).  If they can't agree, though, we may see them disappear as well.

[SithRose]

It would appear that the "realignment" involves the probability of NCSoft releasing marketing and PR for individual games back to the studios that produce those games, rather than handling all marketing for all games themselves.

This is, I think, a good sign for the individual studios.