OK, I am not posting this in the profit thread because it's a bit of a separate thing. I decided to download all the profit reports from NCSoft since 2005 and enter all CoH sales numbers into a neat spreadsheet, then compare year-to-year changes.
Here is what I got so far:
Now, there are a few things that just don't make sense to me. In 2011, Q2, CoH went F2P. It is no secret that everyone at NCSoft and Paragon have stated they started making a lot more money at this point, but my data entry does not show this. On the contrary, I see a pure drop of 20% year over year... it's almost the kind of thing that you would expect to happen if the game went F2P but added no shop...
Next quarter is worse; an even bigger dive year over year (although to be fair, that same quarter the previous year was strangely exceptional, release of GR and extra box sales?)
Anyways, this has be troubled. Either the values are entered wrong, meaning I F-ed up, or for some reason the quarterly reports never gave credit to City of Heroes for their Cash Shop sales... Anyone around here can shed some light on this?
Even with those low values, the last quarter showed a small year over year increase and the game was headed for a 10-11 billion won year, something that seems to still have been profitable. My wory here is:
A) Conspiracy: Investors were intentionally blinded to cash shop revenue
B) Incompetence: I am an idiot and missed something.
C) Lies: someone lied to us about the positive impact of F2P, but I highly doubt it. Would be the first game to not at minimum double revenue by going F2P.