S.Korea's game companies wage intense war in MMORPG sector

South Korea's massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), a mainstream genre in domestic games, is showing signs of an increasingly heated competition.

WeMade Co. has challenged NCSoft Corp.'s market-leading game Lineage M and Com2uS Holdings Corp. will release a game in the second quarter.

Industry sources on Monday said WeMade's MMORPG Night Crows, which was released on April 27, once ranked first in sales on May 3 in the game category of the Android app market Google Play and No. 1 on Apple's App Store on the day of the game's release.

MMORPGs are considered the yolk of domestic games, with their popularity so high that as of May 3, they comprised seven of the top 10 games on Google Play.

Game pundits are monitoring the competition for No. 1 between Night Crows and Lineage M because the latter has reigned as the absolute ruler of the MMORPG kingdom since its release in 2017.

Nexon's Wars of Prasia and Kakao Games' Arche Age War, both of which were released in March, also broached the stronghold of Lineage M but failed to top sales. Other games like Dungeon & Fighter Mobile and Odin: Valhalla Rising temporarily hit No. 1 but Lineage M regained the top spot.

Other game companies are preparing to release MMORPG titles this year. For example, Com2uS Holdings will launch Zenonia Chronobreak in the second quarter and earlier this month, the company posted outdoor ads extensively in major cities and regions like Seoul, Gyeonggi Province and Busan.

The barrier to entry for new users is low as Com2uS Holdings used the intellectual property rights of Zenonia when feature phones were popular. The series spans seven games and has around 63 million downloads.

Kakao Games will launch Odin in Japan next month and another MMORPG, Ares: Rise of Guardians, in the third quarter. Its MMORPGs "Odin" and Arche Age War, both of which made the top five in game sales on Google Play late last month, will be fully reflected in the company's second-quarter performance.

Netmarble Corp. will also release in the second quarter the strategy game Grand Cross W and role-playing game Tower of God: New World and the MMORPG Arthdal Chronicles in the second half of the year.

Traditional MMORPG power NCSoft is taking on the competition with its new game Throne and Liberty and will run a week of beta tests on it from May 24~30. Amazon Games, which produced the hit "Lost Ark" in North America, will distribute Throne and Liberty in North and South America, Europe and Japan.

Write to Ju-Hyun Lee at deep@hankyung.com