Q1 2020: Lineage 2 M Sales Set The Pace For NCSoft's Best Quarter Ever

NCSoft has released its financials for Q1 2020, a period spanning January, February, and March of this year. That time frame partially encapsulates some of the period when COVID-19 started to have an impact on everyone's daily lives. Despite people's relative non-mobility over that time, the mobile game business is booming, at least as far as NCSoft is concerned.

Lineage 2 M was the big winner in Q1, raking in over 341 billion Korean won, or almost $280 million. NCSoft as a whole reported total sales of 731 bKRW in the quarter, meaning that one title accounted for nearly half of its total income. That total is also the largest single-quarter total in the company's history, barely edging out the 727 bKRW shortly after Lineage M launched in Q3 2017.

On the MMORPG front, the two Lineage titles saw slight downward motion from Q4 2019, while NCSoft's other three titles -- Aion, Blade & Soul, and Guild Wars 2 -- all rose slightly.

Overall, NCSoft's PC gaming segment brought in about 1/5 the revenue of its mobile segment, which might lead you to the conclusion that traditional PC gaming is doomed, at least from one company's perspective. However, L2M will likely settle down in future quarters, just as the original Lineage M did, and the ratio will be a little less lopsided. NCSoft's PC games are steady revenue-generators, while mobile benefits from short-term booms from new game launches. That kind of stability is likely welcome at the company, and while I wouldn't be surprised to see NCSoft attempt to create more mobile games based on its franchises in the future, I don't think it's going to fully abandon PC gaming.