KDB Daewoo Securuties: Blade & Soul US to become a meaningful earnings variable in 2016 for NCsoft

Morlewen

The Korean investment bank KDB Daewoo Securuties analysed the launch week of Blade & Soul. The analysts are quite satisfied. They predict 2 mln players and a meaningful contribution of the game to the quarterly results of NCsoft.

On January 19th NCSOFT’s Blade & Soul US began service in the US and Europe as a free-to-play game with microtransactions. The game was initially launched with 22 servers, but now has 28 servers due to long queue times and is likely to add more servers given extended queues even after the expansion. NCSOFT said the title attracted more than 1mn players in just one week since its launch, and we believe that number has recently increased to almost 2mn.

Blade & Soul US has been moving up in Alexa’s global traffic ranking. According to compete.com’s data, Blade & Soul US ranks between the international blockbuster League of Legends (LoL) and NCSOFT’s hit title Guild Wars 2 (2014 revenue of W86bn) in terms of traffic. During its first week of release, Blade & Soul US achieved “daily reach” equal to 76% of LoL’s and 473% of Guild Wars 2’s. Since the title is free to play and is in its very early stages, we could see wide swings in future trends, but it seems clear the title will become a meaningful earnings contributor in 2016.

https://www.kdbdw.com/bbs/download/204608.pdf?attachmentId=204608

holdenhamlet

Seems like good news.  I honestly really like the game and hope it does well.

Zen00

I'd like the game better if I didn't feel that my "protagonist" was a complete moron the whole way through the storyline.

harris195

I felt like they made the protagonist a damn push around

Phry

How they can make any kind of a valid prediction with such flimsy evidence is beyond me, if they had made it based on 3 months of solid performance, then that would have some kind of validity, also, why are they even making that kind of prediction anyway, unless they have some kind of stake in it?
PR shenanigans, most likely, but from a source without any real credibility, is kind of odd.

TechnoMonkey

Phry said:

How they can make any kind of a valid prediction with such flimsy evidence is beyond me, if they had made it based on 3 months of solid performance, then that would have some kind of validity, also, why are they even making that kind of prediction anyway, unless they have some kind of stake in it?
PR shenanigans, most likely, but from a source without any real credibility, is kind of odd.

Phry for Chief Investment Bank Analyst!

A source without any real credibility.......................

xpsync

holdenhamlet said:

Seems like good news.  I honestly really like the game and hope it does well.

Same here.

And why am i only playing Korean games lately?

Wake up NA... Mix it up, i know i'm putting my foot in my mouth but I'm sorry, ESO, SWTOR and so on are so f'in boring. The boredom literally hurts when you try and play them, and why are they boring, they copy and pasted their games, before anyone freaks out, yes lots of people like them, and that's cool too.

But coming from someone old school who should love those types of mmo's, well, i don't, i can say it, they brutally boring. I'm probably like that as there was a time when we were literally saturated with these carbon copied mmo's, like an amazing song over played on the radio, it was a great song but...