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NCsoft Q3 2006 earnings release

It's time for another set of NCsoft earnings documents:

Q3 2006 earnings press release
Q3 2006 earnings presentation

Some highlights:

• Sales and net income are down compared to Q3 2005 but net income made a huge recovery from Q2 2006 which was depressed in large part because of the write off for Auto Assault.


• Subscriber/activity numbers for Lineage I/II are continuing their downward trend though oddly enough they are seeing some (small) growth in the number of US and European players of Lineage II.


• City of Heroes/City of Villians is still holding steady at around 170K subscribers.


• Guild Wars is still attacting new account signups in the US and Europe at a decent rate (~350K new accounts created in Q3 2006) but sales are down 31% from Q2 2006. The Nightfall campaign was just released so there should be an increase in sales in Q4. Also Guild Wars is expected to start beta testing in China at the end of November with an anticipated release sometime in February so it'll be interesting to see if Guild Wars can become the second MMORPG from the US to attract a large number players in China.


• Though Auto Assault is still operating, they don't even bother to show any subscriber numbers for that game.

Still chugging along, good good.

Glad to see Guild Wars is still doing okay, and that my expectations on the subscriber sub retention for CoH are about right.

I was just talking about these the other day, thanks!

I really wish other companies would do this as well, since they tend to be really interesting.

Maybe they can license the Diebold software that counts into negative numbers before the end of the next quarter.