In a recent interview with Massively, Dan Stahl said: "Cryptic is focused on Star Trek Online and Neverwinter." Translation: We're pretty much ignoring everything else (Champions).
Ok, while I'm here... it's my hope that this report will stop people posting a ton of uninformed nonsense on these forums as they have been up to this point.
First of all, at 45% of NCSoft's profits can people please stop saying that Guild Wars 2 is dying or that it's a failure? GW2 has already made a TON of money and it looks like their player base is actually rising instead of dropping.
Another thing, Lineage. It's responsible for 24% of NCSoft's profit. It's 15 years old. It's just about the WoW of the asian world. No it doesn't make WoW type money, I mean that 15 years later and a ton of people still play it. It just keeps making money for NCSoft and it looks like it'll still be going strong for years to come.
Finally, NCSoft is making a ton of money. No matter what their stock price is, they're not in any financial danger whatsoever. Anyone who thinks so has no understanding of business.
Peregrine, you are confusing sales with profit. We have no idea about profit and loss on a per game basis, just it's sales. The only thing we do know about profit and loss is the company as a whole, including all it's subsidiaries, the parent company sans subsidiaries and sometimes each subsidiary.
Now adding to your points.
NCsoft announced back on Dec 28th that Lineage exceeded 220,000 concurrent players. Four years ago, the last time they published concurrent user numbers, Lineage peak in Dec. 2008 was only 162,000. Not a bad uptick for a 15 year old game. Currently Lineage is the number two MMORPG in Korea.
Their cash on hand is up 108% to roughly $110 million USD. On the other hand they've only borrowed $11 million USD. Not a bad cash to debt ratio. They have $287 million USD in short term investments.
They have a 20% profit margin in 2012, that is they make 20 cents on every dollar of revenue as after tax profit. I'm sure they would rather have it at 25% like Nexon and Activision/Blizzard. I guess they just have to settle on the 36% profit margin they made in the 4th quarter.
The company is doing fine. They just had their first 100,000+ million KrW profit for a quarter ($93+ million USD). To put it into perspective, that's more profit in one quarter than CoH made in sales it's first 3 years. They have plenty of cash and short term investments, very little debt.
What we are seeing in the stock price are investors moving their money out of NCsoft because they believe in the short term it will make more money in other stocks or investments. They simply don't believe anymore that the stock will ever get back to 370,000+ anytime soon, if ever. The bubble burst. 14 months ago KDB Daewoo Securities set the 12 month price target at 600,000. Yesterday they set it at 200,000 (there were several reductions in the price target in those 14 months, it wasn't all at once). I think a number of investors are leaving until the analysts that follow NCsoft start guessing correctly again. Or at least in the ballpark.
Edit: One last note. NCsoft's stock in the last 6 months has declined from a peak of 286,500 on Sept 7th to today's close of 128,500, a 55% decline. Apple stock's high in the last 6 months was 702.10 on Sept 19th and it closed yesterday at 457.35, a 35% decline. I don't think anybody is saying Apple is going out of business.
