A couple of bits of information about the current state of NCsoft, at least in Korea.
First B&S has climbed above ArcheAge for the first time since ArcheAge was introduced, according to the site
Gamenote.com (in Korean, use Chrome or a translation service to read the list). So it appears that ArcheAge was just the new kid on the block and after a month or so players are returning to older favorites.
Second, KDB Daewoo has put out another analysis on NCsoft. While nothing has really changed in their forecasts it does contain hours played at PC cafes, info that I couldn't extract off of Gametrics without paying, among their four MMOs, League of Legends (which is the currently the most popular game at PC cafes in Korea) and Diablo III.
Overall the number of hours people were playing NCsoft MMOs (Lineage, Lineage 2 and Aion) in PC cafes dropped from 37.7 million hours per month (Jan 2012) to 23.2 million hours this January. However if you include the B&S numbers it brings the Jan 2013 total back up to 37.6 million hours. In the same period of time LoL went from 11.2 million hours in Jan 2012 to 58.4 million hours (wow!). Diablo III on the overhand peaked at 56.2 million hours in June 2012, plummeted to only 5.1 million in Jan 2013. Swing and a miss for Blizzard. So LoL is the new StarCraft (since StarCraft II isn't).
Of NCsoft's four MMOs, Lineage seems to be the only one holding it's own or growing. Aion numbers are less than half of what they were a year before. For all you B&S haters out there, you will be happy to know that B&S's numbers have yet to level out, going from 40.2 million hours played in July 2012 (new game) to only 14.5 million in Jan 2013 (large drop in Jan 2013 likely due to ArcheAge). Lineage 2 is still following up the pack at a distant 4th losing 1.9 million players from last year.
January 2013
B&S - 14.5 million hours
Aion - 12.8 million hours
Lineage - 7.2 million hours
Lineage II - 3.1 million hours
The most interesting quote in the report was the following.
But with practically every major gaming platform shifting towards online games, we believe developers of high-end, hardcore online games (which are rare these days) will gain value over the long term.
Does this mean the analyst wants more grindy MMOs or simply a comment about the plethora of casual games? Don't know.