Future MMOGs and stuff from NCSoft

A couple of days NCSoft released their earnings report for the 3rd quarter. These reports includes a little bit of information on future plans and work in progress, so it can be interesting to have a look from time to time.

In the MMOG space they seem to have 8 different MMOGs that are being worked on or at least planned. Three of them are named and are not new, Aion (1st half of 2008), Guild Wars 2 (early/mid 2009) and Lineage 3 (early 2011). In addition to this they have mentioned the MMOG from Spacetime Studios (mid 2010) and the one from their Carbine studio (winter 2010/2011).

There is also 3 more MMOGs that are just noted as “unannounced”, in mid 2009, winter 2010/2011 and late 2011. While not mentioned explicitly, my guess is that half of them are mainly aimed at the Asian market and the other half at the Western market due to the way their diagram is organised. One of the unannounced would be for the Western market then, probably developed at NCSoft Austin in that case, since it seems they are working on a new MMOG also. The other unannounced ones are probably being worked on in Seoul then – the report mentions that they are working on several new titles.

Another thing mentioned is an “ecosystem” that they are working on for people that play NCSoft games, with a number of web-based community tools that should work together with the games. Clan managment tools, instant messaging, voice chat and integrated game launcher are things that are mentioned.

However, this seems to mainly be focused on the less massive online games that they are working on, not the MMOGs. Although I hope that they will include their MMOGs in this system. This may prove a bit difficult though, since the existing games have quite different systems in place already in-game, developed quite independently probably.SOE did solve that for some of their games for the chat system though.