Game Predictions Based On NCsoft's History in Korea

[Nadante]

Saw this on Reddit by u/Chainrush and thought I'd share for discussion:

"As a Korean, I am aware what has been happening to Korean mmo market, especially for NCsoft games. Western players are familiar to NCsoft mainly from BnS, Lineage2, and GW2. But in fact, those are already way outdated games for NCsoft and their recent games are far different from them.

Their history in their drastic change starts with Lineage M in 2017, where they port Lineage1 to mobile game but with introduction of gacha in it. Surprisingly, it made huge hit. LineageM alone made over 1.2b USD in a single year. Follow by Lineage M, they released Lineage 2M in 2019 and it made revenue as big as Lineage M. At this point, NCsoft learned mobile gacha game makes huge money than PC mmos and they started focusing in porting all their IPs to mobile gacha. They made Trickster M (2021), Lineage W(2021), and BnS2 (2021) as mobile gacha game.

Beside of being mobile gacha games, they share couple common systems over them and they have reasons behind them.

Limitless world pvp. This leads people to complete and show dominance to other players, which people will eventually pay more money in order to beat up or revenge others. Also, it will allow people to dominate world boss loot, where richers get richer and seize all loots and economy.

Transformation system. Basically, major classes, mounts or pets only can be collected by gacha. Not only that, their rate is beyond being abyssmal. Some Koreans actually spend over $1,000,000 to get the best tier transformation(class). Yes 1 million dollar. You may think there are only few for them, but surprisingly there are many whales like that or even bigger whales in NCsoft games. And that's how they have been successfully making over billion dollar revenue every year from just a single game despite Korea is a country only with 50m population and having less GDP than the US. Keep in mind. This is price for just transformation. You still have to roll gacha for gears, pets and mounts too.

Collection system. If you collect certain items including cash gacha items and list on collection system, you will get permanent stats. This is also known as complete gacha system, which is already banned in Japan for notoriously monetizing consumers with an evil intent. This system already can be found in game. Beside, they will continuously release new collection, which will force people to keep buying new gacha/cash especially with limited period items. Otherwise, people who already invested heavily will start falling behind from his competitors. And this is their strategy and it has been successfully working in KR Lineage market.

[Here he showed comparison screenshots from Lineage M and Throne and Liberty

As I stated earlier, those systems are always implemented in recent NCsoft games. There is no exception. NCsoft knows this monetization works by proving success in Lineage M series since the launch. And I already see the game is genuinely identical to Lineage M based on UI, system and combat.

You may say, I'm being ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ delusional because we don't see the gacha yet in TL. However, NCsoft already answered "not all cash systems are introduced in current beta" on their recent interview. [Linked here: http://www.gameple.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=205877]

Dont forget. There are a lot of behind stories for NCsoft that I can tell as Korean. For example, NCsoft had already made lies on BNS2 and LineageW. They had promised there will be no gear gacha and no transformation gacha before their launch, but they simply reintroduced them with "different naming but same system." Can't believe it? that's what I like to think too, but sadly it's the reality that actually happened

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpAQ3D8bXxU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8m3B3aiztg

There are way too many bad news from them, and probably I have to spend all day if I have to list them all here.

These predatory monetization will happen in TL for sure based on NCsoft's actions for past 6 years and NCsoft will never give it up since they know it will make money for sure"

My thoughts are, I'm gonna play until it becomes a bore and move on, just like any other game. I will keep my gacha money for other games until the dust settles. Too early to tell, but it does look like it's gonna rain bad.

[ministrog]

when i did my own digging, can confirm 2017 was the "year of the mobile" for NCsoft. their follow up on L2M wasn't as strong as that guy was making it but still significantly close to the same success as L1M. they've been hemorrhaging since. personally, i've played a bit of aion classic (their other PC title) and some of the 'player traps' mentioned was also in there too. here's a fun one.

TaL's Stellerite = L1/L2/Aion's Shards

these things imbue every auto attack and skill press. now imagine selling them on the ingame shop. oh that's right they did that already after a massive controversy. same poison, different bottle.

[Jidius]

You could put World of Warcraft/ActiBlizzard and it will be the exact description: You got a game with a store full of mounts and pets, tokens you can buy with real money and sell it ingame to buy stuff and then the RMT business with guilds (with tokens and or rl money).