Korea's Three Biggest MMO Companies File Quarterly. Here Is What the Numbers Have Said Since 2020.

Mobile MMO revenue in Korea dwarfs Western subscription income — the public filings make the gap impossible to miss.

Photo: Blizzard Entertainment Logo · Wikimedia Commons

NCSoft: The Subscription Ancestor That Became a Mobile Company

NCSoft invented Lineage in 1998 and built the subscription template that predated World of Warcraft in South Korea by six years. By 2020, that history was almost beside the point. The company's consolidated revenue for fiscal year 2020 reached approximately 2.4 trillion Korean won — around $2.1 billion at prevailing exchange rates — with mobile titles, principally Lineage M and Lineage 2M, accounting for the decisive majority. The western live-service market, where Blizzard Entertainment's entire business once rested on a subscription fee of roughly $15 per month, produces nothing structurally comparable: a single Korean mobile title aimed at a domestic audience was outearning the subscription revenues of multiple western operators simultaneously.

The years after 2020 complicated that picture without reversing it. NCSoft's revenues stalled in 2022 and then contracted sharply in 2023 as the Lineage franchise aged and no new title matched its commercial weight. The company's quarterly earnings disclosures, published in Korean with English summaries for investor relations, show operating profit falling sharply — the 2023 full-year operating profit was roughly a sixth of the 2020 figure. NCSoft attributed the decline publicly to the maturation of its flagship mobile titles and an increasingly competitive Korean market. Throne and Liberty, its long-delayed PC and console MMO, launched in Korea in December 2023 and in Western markets in partnership with Amazon Games in October 2024; its Steam concurrent-player trajectory became one of the more discussed launch-window stories of that year.

What the filings consistently show is the structural reliance on a small number of titles. NCSoft has no revenue base resembling the diversified portfolio approach of a western publisher like EA. When the Lineage games plateau, the company's financials plateau with them.

Nexon: The Floor Is Higher and the Diversification Is Real

Nexon occupies a different position. Headquartered in Tokyo with its operational center in Seoul and publicly listed in Japan, Nexon reported consolidated revenue of approximately 260 billion Japanese yen for fiscal year 2021 — roughly $2.4 billion — with PC and mobile revenue split more evenly than at NCSoft. Nexon's investor relations filings ↗, filed under Tokyo Stock Exchange disclosure standards, show MapleStory and its mobile variant MapleStory M as persistent top earners, alongside Dungeon and Fighter (known as DNF or Dungeon Fighter Online), which commands an enormous player base in China through a licensing arrangement with Tencent.

Nexon's revenue from China — specifically from Dungeon and Fighter royalties — introduces a variable that does not exist in the Western subscription market: geopolitical and regulatory exposure. When the Chinese gaming regulator paused new game license approvals across 2021 and 2022, Nexon's China-adjacent revenues became a line item that analysts watched closely. The company's filings from that period flag the licensing income and acknowledge regulatory risk with unusual directness by corporate standards.

The scale comparison to western operators remains striking. Jagex, the Cambridge-based studio behind RuneScape, does not publish granular revenue figures as a private company. CCP Games, the Reykjavik developer behind EVE Online, is similarly privately held. The few western MMO companies with public filings — chiefly through parent-company disclosures — do not produce numbers at Nexon's order of magnitude from MMO-adjacent products alone.

Netmarble: The Mobile-Pure Company and the Debt Question

Netmarble's position in the triad is the most volatile. The company, listed on the Korea Exchange and based in the Seoul Metropolitan Area, built its entire business on mobile gaming and has no meaningful PC MMO legacy. Its flagship MMO-adjacent product is Lineage 2 Revolution, launched in 2016 under a licensing arrangement with NCSoft — an unusual structure in which one publicly listed Korean company effectively rents the most valuable IP of another. Netmarble's quarterly filings ↗ show revenue that peaked around the Lineage W launch window and subsequently declined, following a pattern the Korean mobile market has repeated consistently: enormous launch quarters followed by accelerating monetisation decay.

What distinguishes Netmarble from NCSoft and Nexon is balance-sheet risk. The company made a series of acquisitions in the late 2010s — including a significant stake in Kabam and other overseas studio purchases — that left it carrying debt at a moment when Korean mobile game revenues were softening industry-wide. Its 2022 and 2023 filings record restructuring costs and workforce reductions alongside the revenue compression. The company's market capitalisation has fallen substantially from its 2021 peak.

Krafton and Kakao: Filed but Different

Krafton and Kakao Games are worth noting precisely because they complicate any attempt to draw a clean line around "Korean MMO companies." Krafton, the PUBG Corporation parent, generates the overwhelming majority of its revenue from a battle-royale title with persistent-world elements — it files quarterly on the Korea Exchange and its disclosures show revenue concentrated in a way that makes NCSoft look diversified. Kakao Games, which has published MMO titles including Elyon and operates the Korean service of Black Desert (Pearl Abyss's flagship product), files separately from Pearl Abyss; the two sets of disclosures must be read together to understand Black Desert's Korean economics, and neither company publishes a clean revenue-per-title breakdown.

What the Aggregate Actually Shows

Placing all five companies' filings side by side — as market-intelligence services like Newzoo ↗ have periodically done in their company revenue rankings — produces a consistent finding: the concentration of MMO and MMO-adjacent revenue in South Korea, tilted overwhelmingly toward mobile, is not a trend that began in 2020. It was already true in 2018 and 2019. What the post-2020 period added was evidence of maturation: the Korean mobile MMO market's growth rate slowed, the largest titles began showing decay curves, and the companies that had structured themselves entirely around that model faced the consequences in their operating-profit lines.

The Western subscription market, never remotely this large in aggregate, proved more durable at its much lower absolute level. A monthly fee of $14.99 produces a different revenue shape than a mobile title built on high-velocity monetisation — slower to peak, slower to decay. The Korean quarterly filings make the comparison legible in numbers that neither side of the market particularly benefits from advertising.