Nexon's new game beats Lineage to top app stores list

Nexon Co.'s Dungeon & Fighter Mobile has elbowed out NCSoft Corp.'s Lineage W to rank as the most popular Korean mobile game in the week since its March 24 debut, according to Nexon on Sunday.

As of April 1, the mobile version of Nexon's popular multiplayer role-playing game Dungeon & Fighter Online had clinched the top position among Korean gaming apps on the Apple App Store. 

Also as of April 1, the two-dimensional action game became the top-grossing Korean title on the Google Play Store. On April 3, it was neck and neck with Lineage W to claim the top spot on the Google app store.

Even before its release, Dungeon & Fighter Mobile was the talk of the town, achieving 1.2 million pre-downloads and 1.1 million cases of in-game character creation by would-be users.

It is unusual for a classic action game to beat massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as Lineage W and its mobile version Lineage M in South Korea, where MMORPGs have long held their No. 1 position in the gaming market.

Dungeon & Fighter Mobile is based on the intellectual property of Nexon's online PC game Dungeon Fighter. Since its release in 2005, the online game had played a key role in propelling Nexon to become the country's largest game developer.

Its China debut in 2008 fueled the game's explosive sales growth, with its number of simultaneously connected users reaching 5 million at one point. Dungeon Fighter Online boats 850 million global users, with cumulative sales of $18 billion.

Initially, Nexon had picked China as the first country to launch the mobile version. But a Chinese regulation imposing a curfew on online gaming for minors forced Nexon to indefinitely push back the launch in China, just a day before its scheduled release in August of last year.

At the time, it received 60 million pre-orders from the neighboring country for the then-upcoming game.

Dungeon & Fighter Mobile features high-quality dot graphics and reduces its dependence on random item draw boxes, where items such as characters and weapons are randomly selected.

The draw boxes, which Nexon introduced in 2004, have been criticized for luring gamers to spend more money to bet on randomly selected items.

To improve the game design and player experience, Nexon Korea Corp.'s Chief Executive Lee Jung-hun and all employees of its affiliates participated in the two testing rounds of the latest mobile title between October and December of last year.

Meanwhile, Nexon recently introduced its own payment system for the computer version of Dungeon Fighter Mobile to wipe out hefty commissions paid to app stores. Its mobile game players are now able to also play the game on computer using the same account.

As of February, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund Public Investment Fund (PIF) has built up a 5% stake in Tokyo-listed Nexon for $883 million, according to Nexon.

Write to Seung-Woo Lee at swlee@hankyung.com
Yeonhee Kim edited this article.