This news (about less than stellar revenues from Throne and Liberty’s KR launch) from a financial analyst who covers NCSoft, unsurprisingly tracks with the planned server mergers. They however expected these numbers to be soft until the global release takes place later this year (the research note to investors mentions a CBT for Q1 2024 though Amazon Games has yet to make any such announcement, and expects AGS to launch shortly after this CBT in Q2 2024 or by June 2024 at the latest IF there are no delays).
This article also notes NC’s restructuring (along with the impending appointment of a new CEO). They expect the company to see a broader shift in focus along with an expectation in increasing revenues from their non-MMO segments including some of the new projects that were unveiled at G-STAR 2023.
IMHO, I do see some headwinds for Throne and Liberty given how quickly the game has lost players in the first month. The game is missing the broader appeal aspects that would help to draw in and also retain demographics outside of the core hardcore grinder and PvP ones. But that was a conscious decision to try to make this game more appealing to the Lineage demographic (even though more of the old school KR players want it to be even more grindier and P2W than what currently exists).
At this juncture, the longevity of this title doesn’t look good (because even though many Koreans think this will do better in the west due to it being not as P2W as most KMMO’s tend to be domestically, I still believe the grindy nature will be attractive to a much smaller niche of players). I’m also not expecting much from AGS (and as stated before, am leery due to who the product lead is), but I guess we’ll see.
