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Imagine my surprise to find myself refered to in the above comment, when I came to this blog from a completely unrelated link .. I love the internet. (Hi dami!)

Yes, I can confirm that the drop in Q1 sales can be explained by the fact that Zera (Naver), SUN (Webzen) and Granado Espada (HanbitSoft) all entered open beta phases during that period. All three games had huge amounts of hype (Koreans called them the 'Big Three'), and all three were competing to follow Lineage 1 and Lineage 2 as the national MMO of choice.

As damijin said, we would have to wait for Q2 and Q3 reports to see how many of those players stuck with their new MMOG. So far, player response to all three games are not as enthusiastic as was expected. However it does seem true that NCsoft is losing their holding on the Korean market since they now have to compete not only with other Korean companies but also companies such as Blizzard and Sony making large scale MMO releases in the area.

As for Guild Wars, there are a number of reasons why it didn't do well in Korea. At first I had thought it had to do with marketing but apparently there were a large number of players during open beta. The problem is that it was marketed to the wrong crowd. The strength in GW is the fact that there are no subscriptions and its PvP gameplay. Their PvE content is limited and is only there to set up the player for PvP. Yet it was marketed to MMO players who are almost entirely PvE oriented, and participate in PvP only because of ingame politics. The lack of subscription was never a big selling point in Korea because players there do not need credit cards to process payment. It is usually done through their cell phone bills, and most people, even pre-teens, have cell phones.

Also, the game suffered from serious server problems end of OB and beginning of retail. At this point, even players that bought the game are not logging in to play.