2 'Lineage' mobile games recording mega sales

By Yoon Sung-won

Two new mobile games based on one of Korea’s oldest computer games, the “Lineage” series, are achieving record-breaking market success right after their release.

Industry sources highlighted that the win-win scenario for NCSOFT’s “Lineage: Red Knights” and Netmarble Games’ “Lineage 2: Revolution” reflects not only the power of popular content but also faster-than-expected growth of the domestic mobile game market.

According to the mobile game industry here, “Revolution” marked the top spot of top-grossing charts at both Google Play and Apple Appstore right after its release last Wednesday. It attracted more than 1 million users less than half a day after its launch and posted over 2 million downloads, which both are records for the domestic mobile game market.

Considering the top-grossing mobile game at Google Play generates 1 to 1.5 billion won in sales on average, the sales performance of “Revolution” is at an unprecedented level, according to industry sources. The role-playing game (RPG) is estimated to have generated about 7 billion won in sales on its release day.

“Red Knights” also became the top-grossing game both at Google Play and Apple Appstore when it was released on Dec. 8. Though it yielded the top perch to “Revolution” last week, “Red Knights” still remains at the second position, showing off the dominating presence of the game franchise’s intellectual property (IP).

“Though it has already been known that the domestic mobile RPG sector has continued to grow at a rapid pace, the two Lineage titles showed that the size of the market here is much larger than expected,” a source at a mobile game company said.

Another game industry insider said the two games, which are based on the same game IP, can thrive together in the mobile game market because they have completely different game styles.

“Whereas NCSOFT redesigned the original computer game with a casual style for Red Knights, Netmarble tried to bring the original concepts as they are for the mobile game,” the source said. “This will clearly differentiate the two games and users with different game style tastes will choose what they want.”

NCSOFT released computer online RPG “Lineage” in 1998, based on a namesake Korean cartoon. Starting with drawing more than 1 million subscribers within 15 months after its launch, it became the first Korean game to singlehandedly post over 1 trillion won in cumulative sales in 2007. As of last year, the game still brought a total of 313 billion won to NCSOFT 17 years after its release. This is about 37 percent of the total annual revenue of the country’s leading online game company.

Meanwhile, the better-than-expected performance of the “Red Knights” reveals the prospects of NCSOFT’s mobile game business are bright, as the company plans to launch more “Lineage” games in the future.

NCSOFT has said it will release a new mobile RPG dubbed “Lineage M” in the first half of next year. Unlike “Red Knights,” “Lineage M” will be a full mobile conversion of the computer game, an NCSOFT official said.

According to Yuanta Securities analyst Lee Chang-young, NCSOFT is expected to record about 223.6 billion won next year, jumping 13 times from this year’s projection of 16.8 billion won.