NCsoft Q2 2024: NCsoft says it’s not shifting focus away from MMORPGs

In the chaos of August financial releases and Gamescom, we overlooked NCsoft’s Q2 2024 financial release, so we’re tackling it now. Unfortunately, it’s not great news overall for the company, which reported another decline in sales, down 16% since the same quarter last year. While net income is up 133% since Q2 2023, operating profit is down 75% over the same period.

According to the Korea Herald, which referred to NCsoft as being in a state of “management crisis,” favorable currency exchange rates and cost-cutting efforts contributed to the net profits and positive operating profits, respectively.

Of particular interest to our MMORPG fanbase is the ongoing success of Guild Wars 2, which is continuing to pull in End of Dragons era revenue numbers; in fact, Q2 generated more revenue than Q2 and Q3 last year – Q3 being when the current cadence of expansions launches. The GW2 subreddit has an excellent graph showing the game’s revenues since 2017, for a prettier-than-NCsoft’s look at how well the last few years have gone for the game.

GW2 Sales from NCSoft 2Q 2024 Financials
byu/MeansOfSabotage inGuildwars2

Lineage 2, Aion, and Blade & Soul, on the other hand, have continued their slow revenue decline over time, all three down since Q2 2023. Original flavor Lineage, of course, continues its steady revenue; the main problem with NCsoft’s revenues is the sharp hit to mobile over the last year, as all four of its top mobile games have seen heavy revenue dips.

We do note here that NCsoft has continued to omit per-game revenue data on Throne & Liberty. The game has been out in Korea since the end of 2023 and is now expected to launch in the west in October after multiple delays. Thanks to the March investor meeting, we also know that Guild Wars 3 is still in the works at ArenaNet.

The investor Q&A following the presentation saw NCsoft CFO Won Jun Hong sidestep a question about the apparent failure of Battle Crush and suggest that NCsoft is pleased enough with its efforts to shore up Lineage M that it will apply similar strategies to bolster its other mobile titles. Perhaps most importantly, he recommits to the MMORPG genre.

“Diversification does not mean we are shifting focus away from MMORPGs, where we have significant expertise,” he says. “We have separate organizations and sufficient resources dedicated to developing new genres. This two-track strategy includes both internal development and external collaborations to ensure we can excel in new areas while maintaining our strength in MMORPGs.”