NCsoft

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NCsoft Corporation
㈜엔씨소프트

Type	Public (KRX: 036570)
Founded	March 1997
Headquarters	Seoul, South Korea (HQ) (Subsidiary Companies) Osaka, Japan Shanghai, China Brighton, England Austin, Texas, USA Seattle, Washington, USA
Key people	T.J. Kim, CEO
Industry	Video games Entertainment
Products	Lineage Guild Wars Aion: Tower of Eternity City of Heroes
Employees	2,448
Website	http://www.ncsoft.com

NCsoft (KRX: 036570) is a South Korean based online computer game company, which produced and published massively multiplayer online role-playing games including Lineage and Guild Wars. Lineage III, the sequel to the successful Lineage II, is slated for 2011.

1 History
2 Stolen Code
3 Titles
4 References
5 External links

History

NCsoft was originally founded in March 1997 by T.J. Kim, a business software developer and author of the Korean word processor Hangul. One of the company's first products was NC HTML Editor. In September 1998, NCsoft launched its first and most popular game, Lineage. Lineage was the first MMORPG to exceed the record of 100,000 concurrent users for the first time in Korea in December 2000. The success of this game helped the company expand to locations in Taiwan, China, Japan, and the United States.

The company established a US subsidiary called NC Interactive (based in Austin, Texas) as a partnership with Richard Garriott's Destination Games in April 2001. NCsoft programmer Jake Song also moved to Austin in order to stimulate development. The branch developed MMORPGs and acts as the home to NC Interactive, NCsoft's division for support in North America (which had been established in May 2000).

Launched in July 2004, NCsoft Europe is a wholly owned subsidiary with its main office in Brighton, England. They brought City of Heroes to several European countries on February 4, 2005 and established Lineage II servers (Teon and Franz).

It was announced at E3 2007 that NCsoft had become an exclusive third party Sony developer, and will be developing exclusive games for the Playstation Network.^[1]

On September 10th, 2008, NCsoft announced the formation of NC West, a subsidiary which manages NCsoft's other western subsidiaries, and plans to establish a headquarters for that subsidiary in Seattle, Washington by the end of 2008.^[2]

Stolen Code

On April 27, 2007, Seoul Metropolitan Police said that seven former employees of NCsoft are suspected of selling the Lineage III source code to a major Japanese game company. According to NCsoft, the potential damaged cost may exceed $1billion USD. ^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7]