The Software Developer : ArenaNet
ArenaNet is a computer game developer and part of NCsoft Corporation, founded in 2000 by Mike O'Brien, Patrick Wyatt and Jeff Strain and located in Bellevue, Washington. They are the developers of the episodic MMORPG series Guild Wars.
The founders of ArenaNet were former employees of Blizzard Entertainment who played important roles in developing the highly successful computer games Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo, Diablo II, and the Battle.net gaming network. Their new studio was briefly called Triforge, Inc. before changing its name to ArenaNet and being acquired by NCsoft.
On September 10, 2008, NCsoft announced that all their North American and European subsidiaries, including ArenaNet, were to be governed by a new division named NC West (a tentative name), headquartered in Seattle, Washington. ArenaNet will no longer report directly to NCsoft Korea. Three of ArenaNet's executives will leave ArenaNet to assume leadership positions in this new organization: Chris Chung will become its CEO, Jeff Strain its president, and Patrick Wyatt its CTO. Guild Wars 2 will continue under the direction of Mike O'Brien, who remains at ArenaNet.
NCsoft 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.
The Editor : NCsoft
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.
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.