While operating income drops 77%.
Double Editor note: The previous editor incorrectly wrote “March” instead of “May” and will be punished for messing up an already botched article. It involves a car battery and learning how the calendar works in six languages.
Editor’s note: This article was supposed to be published on May 11. For some reason it got stuck in our ham sandwich servers and never actually showed up. MMO Fallout apologizes.
NCSoft this week published their first quarter finances for 2021 and the results are, well they are certainly results. With sales totalling 512.5 billion KRW, NCSoft saw a decrease of 30% in sales year over year, with operating profit down 77%, pre-tax income down 64%, and net income down 59%. Mobile game sales decreased 14% over last year with legacy PC online games up 6%.
As far as titles go, most of NCSoft’s games remained flat in terms of income. Lineage 2M saw the most dramatic fall in sales from 341 billion KRW in Q1 2020 to 152 billion in Q1 2021. On the PC side Aion had a massive surge in sales, more than doubling its numbers from 10 billion KRW in Q1 2020 to over 23 billion in Q1 2021. Lineage M was embroiled in a controversy this quarter over changes to the game’s monetization, but the company denied any dent to active user counts as a result of the dispute.
During the conference call NCSoft confirmed again that Project TL (Lineage Eternal) will be released not just on PC but on next gen console. More internal tests are expected in the second half of the year with no date set for launch or public beta. NCSoft are still referring to the game as “TL”. NCSoft also gave a blanket comment regarding development of a slate of console titles.
TL is currently NCSoft’s priority. In terms of releasing games on consoles, NCSoft detailed that they are waiting for people to actually be able to get their hands on the console before releasing titles, something they expect will take potentially two to three years. The games are in the pipeline, but NCSoft has no plans on detailing them in the foreseeable future.
Blade & Soul 2 is apparently garnering quite a bit of interest from Lineage players. According to the conference call, while Blade & Soul primarily attracted adults in their 20s and 30s, Blade & Soul 2 has attracted a lot of pre-registrations from players in their 40s and 50s. More information on Aion 2 should also be coming at some point in the near future.
Source: NCSoft
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