NCsoft Q1 2025: Guild Wars 2’s Janthir Wilds bump is over, Aion 2 is finally getting a reveal date

Spring financial week continues here on MOP, as we now have the NCsoft quarterly report for Q1 2025. And it wasn’t a great quarter, frankly: The company saw revenue drop 12% compared to Q4 2024 and 9% compared to this quarter last year, all following a year when NCsoft was undergoing an organizational restructure and layoffs in an attempt to avoid “becoming a chronically loss-making company.”

As we’ve been covering, a lot of NCsoft’s recent losses in the last year or two have come from the mobile segment, in contrast to PC, which had a strong surge in Q4. That surge is over now, though, as “legacy online PC game sales declined 11%” quarter-over-quarter.

We pay particularly close attention to Guild Wars 2 here, and we note that in Q1 the game has not only slipped back to its pre-Janthir Wilds revenue (which makes sense, given the game gets most of its expansion money for the year in Q4) but also didn’t measure up all that well compared to Q1 2024. That’s giving us pause, since we’re on year two of this new content model and last quarter NCsoft praised Janthir Wilds specifically as the chief driver of sales in North America and Europe.

Worth noting also is that Lineage 2 and Aion both slipped in Q1, while Blade & Soul is seeing a resurgence thanks to BNS Neo. Throne & Liberty is still missing from the otherwise transparent graphs, but as we noted last time, NCsoft has been tucking revenues for the game under royalty sales, which in Q1 “declined 39% QoQ due to the diminishing impact of TL’s global release but rose 38% YoY to KRW 45.0 billion.”

During the investor call, NCsoft intimidated that more layoffs, specifically in “overseas subsidiaries,” are on deck for the company’s streamlining plans, which is wild since last year the company literally poached a competitor’s CEO to rescue NC America and invest more heavily into its overseas holdings. NC also dodged an investor question about global sales for T&L, and it reiterated that Aion 2 (although with LLL and two other games) is still on deck. Last quarter, it teased Aion 2 for Korea and Taiwan in the back half of 2025 with a global arrival at some point after that. We’re expecting more info from NCsoft’s May 29th Aion 2 broadcast, but maybe don’t get overly excited; NCsoft’s Byeong-Moo Park has already acknowledged “pay-to-win elements.”