Throne and Liberty’s Global Success Can’t Stop NCSoft’s Layoffs

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Key Takeaways

  • NCSoft, makers of Thone, Liberty, and Guild Wars, will soon be undergoing layoffs as the company begins to restructure.
  • The news comes despite Throne and Liberty's strong global performance, balanced by poor local sales in South Korea.
  • The restructuring will cancel some projects, leaving future Guild Wars games uncertain.

Despite the successful global launch of Throne and Liberty, all is not well at the studio behind the new MMO.

NCSoft will soon be shedding employees via voluntary retirement layoffs as the hit MMO developers enter a period of restructuring.

For years, the MMO market has been notoriously difficult to break into, with titans like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, and The Elder Scrolls Online still standing while smaller titles have shut down quickly.

Throne and Liberty seems a promising new entrant in this area of gaming. However, it draws in over 3 million players in its first full week and cracks into the Steam top 5 with a peak Steam concurrent player count of 336,300.

While the promising new MMO has drawn many players since its worldwide release, NCSoft’s local sales in South Korea have been substantially lacking.

The game’s early success in other markets has not been enough to reverse the company’s financial fortunes so far, leading the company’s CEOs Taek-Jin Kim and Byung-Moo Park to announce that layoffs will be coming amidst the restructuring.

The CEOs apologized to employees and stated that “we are at risk of becoming a chronically loss-making company.”

Throne and Liberty is far from NCSoft’s first venture into the MMO market. The company is old hands in the genre thanks to the longstanding success of the Guild Wars series.

But even that success cannot be taken for granted. While Guild Wars 3 is reportedly entering development, some NCSoft projects will be canceled as part of the restructuring, leaving the franchise’s future uncertain.