NCSoft Reports Q4 2017 Earnings - Revenues up 79% Year over Year
NCSoft reported Q4 2017 earnings today and it showed company wide revenues increase a whopping 79% year over year thanks to strong performance in their mobile games division.
While mobile game revenues were up huge in 2017, they did fall quarter over quarter. Guild Wars 2 reported strong sales growth in the 4th quarter thanks to the launch of the Path of Fire expansion. Lineage and Lineage 2 showed slight declines on PC while Aion and Blade and Soul reported some quarter over quarter growth.
Still, despite strong growth for Guild Wars 2, the game only made 34.9B KRW ($31.M USD) in revenue in Q4 compared to over $300M for mobile games in the same quarter. In fact, all of NCSoft's legacy PC games earned 135.9B KRW vs 327.1B KRW for mobile games. Despite the staggering size of the mobile games market, NCSoft will likely keep pushing out content for their PC games so long as they remain profitable. The only major NCSoft game that seems to be at risk of being shut down here is probably Aion as it earns the least money of any major NCSoft franchise (Not counting WildStar as a major NCSoft franchise. It'll probably shut down before Aion). Sales breakdown by franchise by year are also available:
Note: Lineage 1's sales decline is largely due to the game's mobile launch. Players switched to the mobile version.
As with previous years, NCSoft generates the vast majority of their revenue from their home market in South Korea. Over 75% of NCSoft's sales are derived from South Korea. The next biggest market is marked as "royalty" income (which is mainly China).
