As Throne And Liberty Nears, NCSoft's Slower Q4 Financials Don't Stop A Better Year-Over-Year Performance in 2022

It's financial time once again and NCSoft has just released theirs along with plans to publish the upcoming fantasy MMORPG Throne and Liberty themselves in Korea... the global publisher still has yet to be announced on that front, though.

Setting global publishing rumors aside, diving into the financial report shows that NCSoft didn't have all that great of a 4th quarter in 2022. Sales were down 28% versus Q4 of 2021 and operating profit was down 57% in that same Q4 2021 versus Q4 2022 comparison. That's just an operating profit of 47.4 billion KRW ($37.5 million USD) in Q4 of 2022 and while that is no doubt a lot of money, it is quite low when compared to all other quarters of 2022.

Ironically, most of that sales loss and operating profit loss year-over-year comes from the mobile side of NCSoft's business which saw a 13% loss in sales quarter-over-quarter, a third straight quarterly loss in the category. PC games, on the other hand, were up 7% in sales amounts in Q4 over Q3.

That may all sound like bad news (in addition to other losses added into the report for currency conversion and tax changes this year and a likely impact from cryptocurrency investments), but for the entire 2022 picture, NCSoft comes out looking pretty good.

While operating profit results fall short of 2020 results and, given the lockdowns in effect then, that isn't a surprise. 2022 saw a profit increase over 2021 of 49% and a net income increase of 14%. Sales themselves are also up year-over-year by 11% and are actually even better than the company's 2020 totals.

In short, a slow final quarter, but a better 2022 than 2021 overall.

On the individual games front, Guild Wars 2 continues to rise in sales in no small part due to the End of Dragons expansion launched in 2022, Lineage II lost a bit but seems to continue to hold pretty steady, Aion continues to float up and down each year, but Blade & Soul fans may have cause for concern in the future as the MMORPG continues to fall short of previous years in sales once again... but hey, almost $20 million is sales is nothing to sneeze at, for sure, but it's a far cry from where the game was 2 years ago, though.

Check out the full financial presentation for more info.