How long till Gravity go out of business?

[Aziral]

Jokes asides from the "dead per buyout" or "dead by end of the world in 2012" I believe the company will last several more years. On a technical level, their emploiyee are well formed: just for their north american division, most of their staff is composed of previous employee of Blizzard and they are running at least three games at this time, including RO.

The point here seems to be more about the case of "will RO private server like this one eventually cause Gravity to close" and the answer is, of course, no. As it happens, its obvious with the current market that many players are ready to pay to be the first to experience new addons and the game's original experience, wich is not limited to the lleveling and pvping system as much as it is centered around social attributes of an mmorpg and I gotta admit: their are a lot of people on the pay-to-play servers. Of course, they will never even come close to making more profit than World of Warcraft, but they certainly aren't losing that much money either.

Aside from that, you gotta think about the fact that Gravity Corp is, basically, a South Korean business. So it is hard to get info on them or their current economic status ( that is, unless you know korean). But I believe we all can guess that they are still working on a few games. Ragnarok Online II has been delayed due to poor review during beta and had to be worked on again du to a change in CEO, but it seems like it's eventually gonna be out this year. I tried it during one of the beta they had and it required a social number to play (harder to hack I guess, but I'm a video game programmer, so...probably not in the long run) It should be released during this year if everything goes fine. If it does, well the company will be insured a new constant income without any problems.

And Finally, lets not forget that gravity gets money from other smaller game ( And I'm still limiting myself to RO) likle the rescent Ragnarok game on the DS. Certainly, they dont get all the money, but most likely they still get something out of it.

So there you have it, my honest opinion as a gamer, and a student in game design and game programming. Of course, I'll mention that I've mostly spoken my mind here, so maybe a few things I've said are wrong, but I believe you can still get the general idea as truth, even if it were the case. However, do feel free to correct me if its the case.

Az