The only part that I can see that would lead to that would be the Q4 for 2011... where there *was* indeed an increase in financial revenues from the previous 6 months.
It is interesting as to how this come across though, it could be read as that the game was actually in quite severe trouble and that there was indeed going to be a very large decline in players and money... and if it wasn't for Freedom, the Q4 revenues would have shown a completely different picture.
Very true. Granted, there are ways to creatively track & report revenue. For example: pre-orders for Going Rogue.
Now, the moment I give my money to NCSoft, it's in their hands, but many/most businesses won't "realize" that revenue in the accounting until the product is delivered. The pre-orders gave us access to powersets early, though, so some of the product was effectively delivered in advance. This could justify early-realizing some or all of that revenue early, if they wanted.. If some or all of that revenue was reported in the quarter prior to release, it would "fill some potholes" in any decline they may have been experiencing, camouflaging it from the reports. If they'd rather have a bigger-measured "surge" they may have deferred the results to the actual product release. Similar issues arise when it comes to reporting a yearly subscription. Break it down on a month-by-month level as each month is completed? Realize it only after the full contract is completed (at the end of the year?) Realize it whent you have all that cash on-hand and have begun offering the service?
It could be that how that source is measuring the boost in revenue in his reference is using the increase based on his perspective, which is different than how NCSoft is reporting that revenue.
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I went back and re-examind some of the reports, to be sure they didn't explain how they reported these, and wha really stood out for me this time wasn't that CoH was such a small part of those charts, but that it was such a large part of the markets that it served:
- in 2011, CoH had 12,086mn won in sales.
- It was active in the NA (27,383) and EU market (17,928) at the time (45,311 total mn won in sales).
- That's ~26% of those two regions' 2011 sales!
They don't give enough data to fully do this next step, but if you generously assume that all the other titles were proportionally-represented evenly across all markets and give them a respective proportion of the US/European market, then you'd have Aion at ~13,700 won, L1 at ~12,035, and L2 at 6,185 in those regions. Given the wide margin of error for such assumptions, (and my expectation that GW and many of the "other" titles are probably VERY regional) you can still see that CoH could have been a contender for top sales in the markets that it served in 2011. Yet less than a year later it is shut down, so something doesn't add up.
Of course, one annoyance in trying to get any useful info from those reports is the bait-and-switch in metrics. You provide sales based on each game, but you don't report costs based on each game.. you report by subsidiary. This can be roughly translated to region (nc interactive+ Arenanet+ NC Europe comes a bit higher than the european+us total) but you can't really tell the health of a
product here like I'd prefer. If I had the the "costs" per game to compare to the "sales" then we could see each product's individual health. As it is, we don't know how much of the "running in the red" at NC Interactive is from all the other products under development (GWII, Wildstar, Paragon's mystery project) generating no revenue and how much of it is due to bad margins at any one revenue-generator.
