Morgan Stanley still lists NCSoft as a stock to be dumped. Wildstar is no closer to being rolled out, and I have it on extremely good authority that Carbine is operating under "two month warnings" now, which is NO way to run a company nor to get your creative people to do anything other than start looking for jobs elsewhere. GW2 is still underperforming. Despite all the trumpeting of projects to come with Nexxon, not a single project has been announced. Games which were supposed to be released in China by now have not been. Games which were supposed to have been released in the US by now have not been.
Sooner or later someone is going to notice all these things.
Morgan Stanley is one of 39 or 40 firms with analysts looking at NCsoft. All but Morgan Stanley and one other has NCsoft as a buy or outperform.
As for Carbine and Wildstar, they are still cranking out their weekly blog to get the buzz on. Of course Paragon had constant updates about new content right up to the plug being pulled but at that point CoH had cumulative sales of $170+ million. Carbine is currently a big negative. It would be a huge right off and a serious loss of face that the "Most Anticipated MMO for 2013" declared by multiple sites and game cons is still born. As for the 2 month watch list, there is an old saying that goes "in every products development there comes a time to shoot the engineers and put it into production".
Yes B&S was suppose to be nearly out in China already but they had to do some serious retooling between the first and second closed tests. Yes, it was to de-sleezify the female characters as well as toning down the blood shed. However I hadn't heard anything about other titles being late to roll out. The GW2 port was always targeting 4th quarter once the western version of the game came out. Asian language ports can be somewhat difficult due to the much larger character set (which can be planed for) plus all the recorded dialog in the game. Also don't forget that WoW had significant delays with several of their expansions in China.
Maybe Nexon can lend NCsoft some pointers because Nexon has a much larger presence in China than NCsoft. That kind of experience is invaluable.
Yes there's been a joint project announcement back in November, Mabinogi Arena 2.
And I don't know where you are getting your information about GW2 but this evening all but 2 of the 24 American "worlds" have either very high populations or are closed to new characters. However a lot of players are currently transferring characters about as the free server transfers are ending next week as they finally getting guest play working. Guesting allows you to play your character on your home and two other worlds every day. Guest worlds last 24 hours before you can choose a different world.
Now do I think in 2 or 3 weeks that the 4Q and annual numbers will disappoint compared to analyst forecasts, sure, it never ceases to surprise me how bad "experts" can predict quarterly sales and earnings. But unlike November I don't think we'll see another 25% drop in price because fundamentally the company is doing alright relative to other Korean game companies, even the larger software companies. The P/E and P/S rations are now, after the correction that started Oct 2011, in an acceptable range.
