The South Korean developer NCSoft has submitted its quarterly report for the first quarter of 2022. It clearly shows where the journey with online role-playing games is heading in Asia. The new mobile MMORPG Lineage W has earned 373 billion Korean won, about 280 million euros. That’s 8 times more than the 3 major PC MMORPGs Aion, Blade & Soul, and Guild Wars 2, which are also available in the West, have earned together.
This is what you need to know about gaming in Asia: In South Korea and Asia, the gaming market operates differently than it does in the West: consoles hardly play a role across Asia – except for PlayStation and Nintendo in Japan. For a long time, Asia was strictly a PC market.
In fact, few had a PC at home, gamers met in internet cafés and played there. However, in recent years, smartphones have taken over gaming: almost everyone in Asia has a powerful smartphone and plays on it.
The mobile MMO Lineage W is the mega-seller in Asia in recent months – in Germany, MMORPG fans can be attracted by such games, as experience shows:
Mobile MMORPGs bring huge growth to NCSoft
These are the numbers:
- NCSoft presented its quarterly figures for the first quarter of 2022 on May 13, covering the period from January to March 2022 (via ncsoft).
- Once again, it shows how extremely strong mobile games have developed in recent years: compared to the previous year, NCSoft was able to almost double its revenues from mobile MMORPGs.
- This is mainly due to the new mobile MMORPG Lineage W: The game was released in November 2021 in 12 Asian countries and is a mega-hit for NCSoft.
However, in PC games, NCSoft has clearly lost revenue within a year. Compared to the previous year, NCSoft has lost 35 billion won – approximately 26 million euros.
Guild Wars 2 still looks relatively good thanks to the expansion
How are the PC MMORPGs doing?
- Blade & Soul performs the worst. Its revenue has halved compared to the previous year.
- AION has also fallen from 17.5 million euros (Q1 2021) to about 12.6 million euros.
- However, Guild Wars 2 is performing slightly better in the first quarter of 2022 than in the first quarter of 2021 – apparently due to the expansion “End of Dragons”.
All of NCSoft’s PC games are showing their age by now. Aion has already announced that it has fewer players than before and is now looking for ways to deal with it (via mmorpg.com).
This is the hope for fans of PC MMORPGs, Throne and Liberty:
How does it compare to Mobile MMORPG?
Lineage W plays in a completely different category than the aging PC MMORPGs: Lineage W earned the incredible sum of 373 billion won in the first quarter of 2022, which corresponds to approximately 280 million euros.
Thus, Lineage W has generated about 8.5 times more revenue than the 3 PC MMORPGs Blade & Soul, Aion, and Guild Wars 2 combined.
Throne and Liberty is the big hope for fans of PC MMORPGs
What’s next for NCSoft? As one might expect, the focus remains on mobile games: the plan is for the global release of Lineage W in 2022, and the mobile game Blade & Soul 2 is also set to be released in more countries in Asia.
However, there is hope for PC fans: the PC MMORPG Project TL, now known as “Throne and Liberty”, is expected to be released in 2022.
