Staying at Headquarters During Organizational Restructuring… Aiming for Chinese and Western Markets?
(Seoul, Yonhap News) Reporter Kim Joo-hwan – NCSOFT has decided to let go of more than half of the development team of the collectible RPG “Hoyun” that remained at the headquarters during the recent division of the development organization.
According to the gaming industry on the 5th, NCSOFT announced plans to release about 100 out of 170 members of the “Hoyun” development team and provided guidance on applying for voluntary retirement.
During the organizational restructuring announced at the end of last month, the “Hoyun” development team moved under the division of CBMO (Chief Business Management Officer) Im Won-ki and remained at the headquarters.
In contrast, development organizations for “Throne and Liberty” (TL), “LLL,” and “TACTAN” are targets for subsidiary spin-offs, and the team for “Battle Crush,” which was released last June, is set to be disbanded.
Launched at the end of August, “Hoyun” is a bright-themed collectible RPG based on the popular intellectual property (IP) “Blade & Soul” by NCSOFT.
“Hoyun” was released with extensive marketing in Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese markets. However, it quickly fell in app market sales rankings in various countries after being evaluated as inferior in terms of gameplay and character design compared to games released around the same time.
According to industry insiders, NCSOFT reportedly considered an early termination of “Hoyun” service during this restructuring.
However, the service is only two months old, and the company seems to have decided to drastically reduce the team size while continuing development with potential services in mind for the Chinese, North American, and European global markets.
In fact, for “Throne and Liberty” (TL), even though its domestic launch in December last year didn’t make a significant impact, the global version released about 10 months later achieved success with 360,000 concurrent players on the PC version and maintains around 150,000, demonstrating initial success.
jujuk@yna.co.kr