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NCsoft limps to first-ever annual loss since IPO of $75M

Published: 12 Feb. 2025, 17:52

CHO YONG-JUN
[email protected]

NCsoft's Research and Development center in Pangyo, Gyeonggi [NCSOFT]

NCsoft suffered its first-ever annual loss in 2024 since it went public as the Korean game publisher's new titles struggled to take off.

The Kospi-listed game publisher recorded an operating loss of 109.2 billion won ($75 million) last year, worse than the projected market consensus of 66.8 billion won, compiled by market tracker FnGuide.

The company's yearly revenue also dropped 11 percent to 1.58 trillion won, while its net profit fell 56 percent on year to 94.1 billion won.

NCsoft had a particularly rough fourth quarter as it logged an operating loss of 129.5 billion won, down from the 3.9 billion won in operating profit recorded in the fourth quarter of 2023.

The company cited one-off termination payments and increased marketing expenses as the reason for the low fourth quarter.

NCsoft's fourth quarter revenue rose 2 percent on year to 409 billion won.

The downbeat performance is attributed to heavy reliance on the Lineage franchise, the cult-classic massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). NCsoft struggled to find new titles that would attract new gamers and tow the company's future. Journey of Monarch, its latest idle RPG released in December, received a negative reception from both investors and gamers.

“We are aware that the MMORPG market is not growing as much [as we hoped],” NCsoft Co-CEO Park Byung-moo said during Wednesday’s conference call, which was held a day after the game publisher posted its yearly earnings.

“We believe user fatigue with the release of similar Lineage-like games has contributed to the factor.”

The co-CEO said NCsoft’s much-anticipated title, Aion 2, hopes to change such sentiment. The title is expected to be released first in Korea and Taiwan in the second half of 2025.

“There’s still a lot of potential users and room for growth, with the release of new MMORPG titles [like Aion 2] that come with new user experiences,” he said.

The game publisher also said its open world MMO shooter title, code-named LLL, will be released before the end of this year.

“After the internal assessment, we decided that the game would be ready by the second half of this year,” the co-CEO said, adding it has plans to begin focus group testing in the second quarter followed by a closed beta test.

“For Tactan, however, while it had a significant development process, we are reconsidering from scratch to how we should release the title [as] the user base for massively multiplayer online real-time strategy games is not big.”

BY CHO YONG-JUN [[email protected]]