World Class Villains

Jeff Strain (ArenaNet co-founder, current President of Product Development) and David Reid (President of Publishing) have both left NCsoft West at the same time. For “unrelated reasons”.

I’m not going to call DOOOOM on this, but for both to leave a month before Aion launches makes me wonder if NCsoft West is going to get hit with much less autonomy by NCsoft Korea who will bring more management control their way. It’s just a bad look for NCsoft West – already the red-headed step child of the NCsoft family for the saga of Tabula Rasa’s failure – and certainly opens the door up for another round of ‘restructuring’.

And if Aion flops for NCsoft West (which doesn’t look likely, but I don’t know how NCsoft Korea is defining success, either), then I wouldn’t be surprised if a number of NCsoft West new titles will be killed on the vine.