NCsoft Q4 2023: Guild Wars 2 is a bright spot for NCsoft as Throne & Liberty stumbles

NCsoft’s Q4 2023 financials weren’t the perk-up that investors surely wanted to see: The Korean gaming giant reported a 31% drop in revenues in 2023 compared to 2022, a 20% drop in Q4 compared to 2022, and only a slight increase in revenues between Q3 and Q4 of this year.

Last quarter, we noted that it was was NCsoft’s mobile MMOs that were dragging down the company’s revenues, not its PC MMORPGs, but in Q4, that trend flipped, with mobile sales (primarily Lineage 2M and Lineage W) up 9% and PC was down 1%, although mobile sales still dropped 38% over the year.

Usually, here is where we turn to the slide breaking down revenues by game – we pay careful attention to Guild Wars 2, for example – but this is the first quarter we can recall that doesn’t include such a slide. This makes it difficult to see how well GW2, Aion, Blade & Soul, and Lineage 2 are performing on the PC side, and of course, that means no data on the newly launched Throne & Liberty. (The last time we remember similar dissembling in an NCsoft report came when it began eliding WildStar’s numbers… in 2016.)

However, the regional breakdown does note that “Q4 NA/EU sales grew by 15% qoq due to strong sales of GW2,” so that’s a welcome tidbit.

During the investor call, NCsoft was taken to task for masking those per-game revenues as well as for revealing no revenue data for Throne & Liberty, which launched in Korea in the middle of the quarter. NCsoft told investors that Throne & Liberty had underperformed and that it’s working on sorting out the game’s rocky launch; however, it looks as if NCsoft is banking more on Amazon’s global release to save the game.