NC Soars Again on the Strength of 'Lineage IP'

Lineage W Mobile Sailing at No.1
Daily Users Reach Record High
Expected to Reflect in Q4 Earnings

NCSoft, once engulfed in crisis rumors, is once again demonstrating the strength of the ‘Lineage’ intellectual property (IP). NCSoft’s new massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), Lineage W, has maintained its position as the top-grossing mobile game in South Korea for a month.

According to Mobile Index on the 6th, Lineage W reached the number one spot in revenue on Google Play and the App Store starting from the 6th of last month. In the combined monthly revenue rankings for November, Lineage W also secured first place. Kakao Games’ Odin: Valhalla Rising ranked second. Following that, Lineage M and Lineage 2M took third and fourth place respectively, making games utilizing the Lineage IP account for 60% of the top five positions.

Lineage W is a work that tells a story set 130 years after the original Lineage. It combines newly created three-dimensional (3D) graphics with the original’s ‘cell and grid-based combat’ system. Notably, NCSoft CEO Kim Taek-jin was directly involved in the development of this new title, making it a game he was deeply committed to.

Lineage W is also recording unprecedented daily active user (DAU) numbers. According to an analysis commissioned by this publication to Mobile Index, the average number of users for Lineage W last month reached 175,791. This figure surpasses the combined users of Lineage M (81,015) and Lineage 2M (24,637). Due to this upward trend, NCSoft increased the number of servers for Lineage W by more than 1.5 times within a month. Lineage W also set a new record for the highest daily revenue among NCSoft games, achieving 12 billion KRW in daily sales, surpassing the 10.7 billion KRW daily revenue of Lineage M in 2017.

This success is expected to be reflected in NCSoft’s fourth-quarter earnings. The company’s stock price, which had plummeted due to controversies over loot boxes and the poor performance of Blade & Soul 2, is also showing an upward trend. NCSoft’s stock price, which had fallen to the 500,000 KRW range in September, has recovered to the 700,000 KRW range. Securities firms forecast NCSoft’s fourth-quarter revenue at 809 billion KRW and operating profit at 264 billion KRW, representing increases of 44% and 68% year-over-year, respectively. Jung Ho-yoon, a researcher at Korea Investment & Securities, stated, “From the fourth quarter, a full-scale improvement in performance driven by the success of Lineage W is expected to begin.”