NCsoft Q4 2022: Guild Wars 2 had a great 2022, Throne & Liberty is still launching by summer

There’s good news and bad news in the Q4 2022 and FY 2022 financial report, and the bad news might help explain why NCsoft decided to take an axe to its western subsidiary in the form of mass layoffs a few weeks ago. While the company’s overall sales and operating profit are up when comparing 2022 to 2021 (11% and 49% respectively), Q4 capped off a year when revenue peaked in the first quarter and declined ever since and NCsoft’s Q4 saw a 28% YOY decline.

Mobile and the Lineage franchise continue to be the backbone of NCsoft’s finances overall, even with mobile declining over the year and PC gathering steam. It’s worth pointing out that Guild Wars 2 actually brought in more revenue than Lineage II last year and came darn close to matching Lineage itself, though that’s as much to do with the Lineage franchise’s decline (and Lineage players moving to mobile Lineage titles) as with Guild Wars 2’s End of Dragons, which the company notes heavily boosted the game’s (and the PC segment’s) fortunes. Aion, we note again, was bolstered by Aion Classic, while Blade and Soul continues its deep decline, having seen its finances fall 64% over the last few years. (Unfortunately, NCsoft’s recent decisions to slow the game’s content cadence seems likely to hasten, not reverse, those fortunes.)

During the investor call, NCsoft reiterated that Throne & Liberty will enter its last round of testing this month in Korea and repeated its plan to launch in the first half of 2023, same as it announced back in December. Given rumors that NCsoft was in talks with Amazon about Throne & Liberty – and given the fact that the company laid off a huge chunk of its western publishing staff at the top of the year while simultaneously insisting the game itself wouldn’t be impacted – we’ve been assuming that a western company will handle publishing the game in our region. That’s been confirmed as of the presentation, though we still don’t know which company won the prize.