NCsoft Korea confirms restructure and layoffs, renames Throne & Liberty team to Studio X

Last night, we covered the disturbing industry news that NCsoft was planning a major restructure of its Korean branch owing to the long-obvious fact that it’s seen poor revenues over the last year. Now, we have confirmation thanks to a letter from execs to workers.

Yonhap’s follow-up piece on the situation includes quotes from NCSoft co-CEOs Taek-Jin Kim and Byung-Moo Park, who have now told employees that “financial performance has continued to deteriorate” putting NCsoft “at risk of becoming a chronically loss-making company,” and that this situation “is seriously damaging the creativity and challenging spirit that NC originally possessed.” The duo confirm that layoffs are indeed incoming.

“Throne and Liberty (TL), which has successfully entered the global market, will be newly launched as game development studios, followed by LLL and TACTAN,” the letter to employees says. “We plan to continue developing new intellectual properties (IP) in the form of independent studios.”

It’s also split into four divisions: NCAI, Studio X, Studio Y, and Studio G. Supposedly these are preliminary names, but Studio X is the one you’ll want to watch – that’s the Throne & Liberty studio.

As we noted last night, NCsoft’s financials have been a mess over the last few quarters, largely because of a serious decline in the Lineage franchise, especially the mobile games that made up two-thirds of the company’s incomes. Our readers know well that the Throne & Liberty launch in Korea was so bad NCsoft masked per-game sales that quarter – another move it hasn’t made in a decade. The studio also apparently whiffed with Battle Crush.

Before you panic, there’s no mention of NCsoft’s western division, which has already been reorganized and slimmed down dramatically; NCsoft execs have specifically touted Guild Wars 2’s solid revenues and in-development Guild Wars 3 as bright spots in its finances. We also have no specific reason to think the City of Heroes license to Homecoming is in jeopardy.