Large MMORPG company is in the crisis because 10 games in total bring in too little coal

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Over the past 28 years, the South Korean company has established itself as one of the most important operators of online role-playing games. For some time now, however, the publisher and developer has been crisis, and this is largely due to the PC MMORPGs.

What about ncsoft? There are more and more information or even evidence that the South Korean publisher and developer is in a tangible crisis:

Aion 2 is the great hope for NCSOFT:

Aion 2 shows the gameplay of the MMORPG in the trailer

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There are no fresh success on the PC

What is the reason for the crisis? If you look at the current line-up of NCSOFT PC MMORPGs, then you will notice: Away from Throne and Liberty, all other pillars of the company are twelve or even more years old:

  • Lineage (September 1998)
  • Lineage 2 (October 2003)
  • Guild Wars (April 2005)
  • Aion (September 2009)
  • Blade & Soul (June 2012)
  • Guild Wars 2 (August 2012)

    • This can be explained by several reasons.

  • For the first because some MMORPG projects such as Tabula Rasa (2007) and Wildstar (2014) have been stopped in the meantime due to a lack of success.
  • Secondly, because there was a clear focus change from NCSOFT over the past decade.
  • And the third because the development of Throne and Liberty ran over more than one decade and bound many resources during this time.

    • The official sales figures from NCSOFT have reflected the age of the current PC MMORPGs and the focus on mobile for years. According to the finance report for the 4th quarter of 2024 (via ncsoft.com), the mobile game Lineage m alone is said to have made more sales throughout 2024 than Guild Wars 2, Blade & Soul, Aion, Lineage 2 and Lineage. It looked similar in 2022 and 2023.

    On top of that, the other mobile spinoffs Lineage 2m, Lineage W and Blade & Soul 2, which means that the Mobile Sector from NCSOFT comes to many times the sales of the PC division.

    But also in the mobile area there is a lack of new releases. From 2022 to 2024, the total turnover caused by the mobile games by more than half. The bottom line is that NCSoft currently has ten active MMORPGs on the market, which together generate far too few sales.

    What does the future bring? With Aion 2 there is currently only a new project from NCSOFT that actually has a release period. Other games such as Project LLL (a SciFi-MMO shooter), Tactan: Knights of the Gods (RTS-MMO), the Horizon-MMO or the MMORPG Project E have been announced for years, and it is unclear whether one of them is one of the developments set up or whether everyone is still in production.

    And then there are the two games that are to be created at Arenanet: Guild Wars 3 and an AAA game that is developed in Unreal Engine 5. In both cases, the release is likely to be gone for several years. More on this: Arenanet is looking for reinforcement for “unannounced project” – what about Guild Wars 3? In short: NCSOFT is heading for difficult times for now.

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