NCsoft Q4 2024: Guild Wars 2 and Blade & Soul are doing great, with Aion 2 waiting in the wings

The MMO company financial news just keeps coming this week as now we’ve got NCsoft’s Q4 2024 financial report, and no, this one isn’t the prettiest picture either. The report comes just months after NCsoft implemented major organizational restructure, coupled with huge layoffs, in an attempt to avoid “becoming a chronically loss-making company.”

This round, NCsoft’s sales were up 2% since Q3 and down only 6% since Q4 2023, but operating profits took a nosedive this past quarter. Some of those revenue losses come from the mobile segment; as we’ve been covering for the last year or so, NCsoft was heavily invested in the mobile versions of the Lineage franchise, which have declined dramatically just in the last year, barring a short-lived surged for Lineage M itself in Q3.

We do have some good news on the PC MMORPG side, however, as that segment – which represents 23% of NCsoft’s sales – surged to its highest quarter in over a year. That drive was led by two games in particularly: Blade and Soul and Guild Wars 2. B&S, of course, launched B&S NEO in Korea, which quadrupled the game’s usual revenue intake. And Guild Wars 2, which had slumped slightly in Q3, is back up to the numbers it was showing a year ago; NCsoft credits Guild Wars 2’s Janthir Wilds specifically as the chief driver of Q4 sales in North America and Europe, where the company is putting renewed effort, but it’s clearly not returning to its 2022 End of Dragons-driven modern peak.

Worth noting is that Throne & Liberty is still not included among NCsoft’s MMO revenue chart, in spite of the fact that it’s now been out in Korea well over a year and out globally since last fall. The company does say that it saw royalty sales rise by 93% QOQ and 140% YOY as T&L’s “global success was fully captured in 4Q,” so apparently that’s where NCsoft is tucking those numbers.

In the investor call, NCsoft execs told investors that 2025 will be a year of “turnaround” for the company, now that it has divested itself of what sounds like around 2000 staff and multiple games in an effort to stay solvent. They believe that there is still a lot of space in the global MMORPG market, especially for companies positioned to launch globally. That includes Aion 2, which NCsoft had previously said was coming in 2025; however, now it sounds as if it’ll release in Korea and Taiwan in the second half of this year and go global after that (no date given) with a “different approach” for the userbases, similar to the Throne & Liberty rollout in 2023/2024. The company said it wouldn’t given many details on Aion 2 right now because of “spoilers.” Heh.

Finally, in response to questions about AI, NCsoft execs say AI is “a must, not a choice” and confirm that the company has already deployed AI and LLM technology and is looking into ways of using it more to save costs under NCAI (not a lot of specifics here, though – it sounds like mostly localization, animation, and moderation, though).