NCSOFT envisions success on new games

By Yoon Sung-won

NCSOFT has posted 188.1 billion won in sales in the first quarter, up 6 percent from a year ago.

The nation’s second-largest online game company said in its regulatory filing on Wednesday that robust domestic sales of its oldest game, “Lineage,” and the popularity of “Blade & Soul” in Japan and Taiwan had led growth.

“We anticipate that the title will continue to be our revenue driver in the future as it broke the sales record in the previous quarter,” said NCSOFT Chief Financial Officer Yoon Jae-soo, during a conference call on Wednesday.

Its operating profit reached 44.9 billion won, up 1 percent from a year ago. Net profit was 35.6 billion won, down 3 percent in the same period.

In the first quarter last year, NCSOFT posted 178.1 billion won in sales, 44.5 billion won in operating profit and 36.5 billion won net profit.

The company revealed positive prospects for its new online PC games and mobile games scheduled to be unveiled later this year.

Yoon said the new action strategy game “MXM” would be rolled out here this year. The game will be tested in China at the end of May through the nation’s largest game publisher, Tencent.

Asked about competition with games in similar genres, such as “League of Legends” by Riot Games and “Heroes of the Storm” by Blizzard Entertainment, Yoon said the company would concentrate on differentiating game contents and developing a better monetization model.

The much-hyped online role-playing game “Lineage Eternal” will have a small-scale test here in June.

“There is no change in plans to release ‘Lineage Eternal’ by early 2017,” Yoon said. “It will be launched globally through a cloud-based game platform.”

In the mobile game sector, the company said it was developing role-playing games for Korea and China and had established a mobile game studio in the Silicon Valley, in the United States, the world’s largest game market. It has also worked with the nation’s top mobile game company, Netmarble Games, since February and plans to launch mobile games based on its PC online games such as “Blade & Soul” and “AION”.

The company said it was developing technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality to provide new experiences for gamers. Yoon said some of the new technologies might be applied to “Lineage Eternal”.

NCSOFT closed at 217,000 won on the Seoul bourse on Wednesday, up 6.37 percent from the previous day, on positive prospects for new games.