NC's Q3 2026: Spending over £1bil to fake a comeback

I have never properly written about NCSoft on this site, which feels overdue now that the company has rebranded itself as simply "NC". Dropping the "Soft" is supposed to look sleek and modern, though given its current output, it reads more like an accidental confession that it can no longer develop proper software. (Source: NC Global Newsroom)

For the past decade, NC has behaved like a studio that forgot how to make anything except Lineage over and over again. Founder Kim Taek-jin built an empire on Lineage in 1998 and spent the 2010s and early 2020s squeezing that exact blueprint into mobile gambling simulators like Lineage M, Lineage 2M and Lineage W, seemingly convinced that guild whale-hunting and enhancement gambling represent the pinnacle of game design and business. While the rest of the industry moved on to global action RPGs, polished gachas and proper live-service games, NC kept churning out the same medieval auto-play formula until domestic players finally walked away and Korean courts tossed out its copyright lawsuits against Lineage clones. (Sources: Korea JoongAng Daily; Chosun Biz)

That complacency hit a wall in 2024 and 2025. NC posted an operating loss in 2024, barely scraped into the black in 2025, gutted its roughly 5,000-person headquarters down to around 3,200 to 3,500 employees through voluntary redundancies and studio spin-offs, cancelled projects left and right (Battle Crush, Project M, Tactan, and later Hoyeon and Blade & Soul 2), and sold off its Samsung-dong tower in Gangnam for 443.5 billion KRW (roughly £230 million or $302 million). Naturally, it is still contractually locked into spending around 1 trillion won total, including 580 billion KRW (roughly £301 million or $395 million) in construction costs, to finish a giant new Pangyo headquarters by September 2027 that was originally designed for the 5,000 people it just got rid of. It is quite literally burning the furniture to finish building a bigger house. (Sources: Maeil Business Newspaper; Hankyung; Chosun Biz)

2026 is the mirage year:

To clean up the mess, NC brought in private equity and M&A lawyer Park Byung-moo as co-CEO in March 2024. His obsession has been chasing huge headline revenue targets, initially aiming for 2.5 trillion won in 2026, raising that guidance to 2.8 trillion won this week, and promising 3.2 trillion to 3.4 trillion won next year. Bigger numbers look impressive on an investor slide, except nobody outside Pangyo bought the story. The day after NC reported Q3 2026 earnings on 11 November, the share price crashed nearly 10% to 188,700 KRW as major Korean brokerages slashed their price targets. (Sources: NC IR Earnings Archive; Seoul Economic Daily; Hankyung)

Here is what the Q3 2026 numbers and nine-month pace actually look like once converted out of won (at current mid-November rates of roughly 1,929 KRW per £1 and 1,467 KRW per $1):

Q3 revenue: 686.5 billion KRW (roughly £355.9 million or $468.0 million), up 90.7% year-on-year, though already down 10.9% from Q2.

Q3 operating costs: 566.9 billion KRW (roughly £293.9 million or $386.4 million), including 249.9 billion KRW (roughly £129.5 million or $170.3 million) in salaries alone and 158.1 billion KRW (roughly £82.0 million or $107.8 million) in marketing.

Q3 operating profit: 119.6 billion KRW (roughly £62.0 million or $81.5 million), down 31.2% from Q2.

Q3 net profit: 20.0 billion KRW (roughly £10.4 million or $13.6 million), down 94.2% year-on-year and down 85% from Q2, missing analyst expectations by nearly 80% due to currency swings and last year's Gangnam building sale distorting the comparison.

First nine months total revenue (Jan to Sep): 2.0144 trillion KRW (roughly £1.044 billion or $1.373 billion).

First nine months operating costs: 1.6076 trillion KRW (roughly £833.4 million or $1.096 billion), pacing roughly 2.2 trillion KRW (around £1.14 billion or $1.50 billion) for the full year, with around 1 trillion KRW (roughly £518 million or $682 million) a year spent purely on payroll.

First nine months operating profit: 406.8 billion KRW (roughly £210.9 million or $277.3 million), while net profit across nine months stood at 303.6 billion KRW (roughly £157.4 million or $207.0 million). (Sources: NC IR Earnings Archive; Korea JoongAng Daily; Maeil Business Newspaper)

Look at that operating cost line again. Even after slicing off more than a third of its HQ workforce, NC is somehow spending over £1.1 billion a year just to operate and market its products, which is actually more than it spent before the layoffs. Making matters worse for shareholders, management refused to announce a share buyback on the Q3 call because it wants to hoard cash for yet another Q4 buyout, and floated replacing its 30%-of-net-profit dividend policy after 2027 with a "Free Cash Flow" formula that conveniently subtracts building construction bills before paying investors. (Sources: Bloter; Seoul Economic Daily)

Buying empty-calorie revenue with ad machines:

Park Byung-moo realised pretty quickly that NC could not invent a hit game fast enough to reach 2.5 trillion won, so he took NC's cash pile (roughly 1.55 trillion KRW, or around £801 million / $1.05 billion remaining at the end of Q3) and went shopping for high-revenue, low-margin ad-tech apps. Across late 2025 and 2026, NC spent over 455 billion KRW (over $306 million at deal dates before smaller add-ons), buying 70% of JustPlay for 301.6 billion KRW ($202 million), 67% of Vietnamese casual developer Lihuhu for 153.4 billion KRW ($103.8 million), plus Korean casual studio Springcomes and Slovenia's Moving Eye. Worse still, JustPlay's founders hold options on the remaining 30%, meaning NC faces another large payout if the app performs. (Sources: NC IR Earnings Archive; DART Corporate Filings; Hankyung)

The trick behind an app like JustPlay (where users play simple casual games for tiny PayPal and gift-card payouts) is accounting inflation. Every pound of gross ad money flowing through the app counts as NC "revenue", which pushed Mobile Casual to 25% of NC's entire Q3 revenue at 171.9 billion KRW (roughly £89.1 million or $117.2 million). What management leaves out of the headline bragging is that 76% of that revenue (130.3 billion KRW, or roughly £67.5 million / $88.8 million in Q3 alone) flies straight back out the door on user-acquisition ads and gift-card rewards, while absorbing those studios and launching a dedicated Pangyo division pushed NC's consolidated salary bill right back above 2024 levels. (Sources: NC IR Earnings Archive; Chosun Biz)

NC refuses to break out Mobile Casual's standalone profit in its quarterly press releases, and statutory filings show why. In the first half of 2026, Springcomes brought in 11.3 billion KRW (roughly £5.9 million) in revenue and cleared a comical 20 million KRW (roughly £10,400 or $13,600) in operating profit, while JustPlay's holding company Veroplay posted 17.0 billion KRW (roughly £8.8 million) in paper operating profit on 126.1 billion KRW revenue alongside negative 34.7 billion KRW in actual operating cash flow. Once you subtract the minority founders' 30% cut and 39.2 billion KRW a year in mandatory M&A intangible amortisation, analysts estimate JustPlay and Lihuhu only add around 45.6 billion KRW (roughly £23.6 million or $31.1 million) in net operating profit to NC across all of 2026. At that pace, it will take 7 to 10 years just to earn back the purchase price, assuming Apple, Google or Meta never squeeze ad-arbitrage margins in the meantime, and Mobile Casual growth already stalled to +1.3% quarter-on-quarter in Q3. Yet buying bloated revenue to pad out the top line appears to be Park's entire strategy, with more casual M&A already promised for Q4. (Sources: DART Corporate Filings; Bloter; Maeil Business Newspaper)

The eye-rolling 2027 plan and the Throne and Liberty corpse:

With every legacy mobile Lineage game bleeding out (down another 22.5% year-on-year in Q3) and domestic Lineage Classic cooling off after carrying PC sales this year, NC's 2027 "growth" plan relies on throwing ten mid-tier launches against the wall and pretending China suddenly wants decade-old Korean pay-to-win garbage. On the slate for next year are Aion 2 China (whose Chinese partner is targeting Q2 2027, giving NC only a royalty slice), Aion Classic Mobile (a mobile port of 2008's Aion 1 somehow pitched globally after Aion 2), Lineage M China with a minor local publisher, and Mistbound, a China-first Guild Wars card game whose reveal trailer got roasted for looking like AI-generated slop. (Sources: NC IR Earnings Archive; Korea Times; Chosun Biz)

China already has massive domestic wuxia MMOs and top-tier anime gachas competing for every minute of player attention; nobody there is clamouring for dated medieval Korean auto-play cash-grabs. The past year proved as much: Blade & Soul 2 shut down in China within 12 months of launch, and even after Tencent launched Lineage 2M in China on 24 June, Lineage 2M's overall revenue still dropped 24.6% year-on-year in Q3. Meanwhile, NC's Sony crossover Horizon Steel Frontiers is a mobile-first MMO where you do not even play as Aloy, paying Sony royalties for a Western single-player console IP that Asian mobile gamers barely care about and Western console fans actively resent, and NC quietly dropped it out of 2027 revenue guidance altogether. That leaves Astrae Oratio (made by Dynamis One, whose offices were raided by police last year over allegedly stealing Nexon development data), generic shooters like Cinder City, and Guild Wars 3, whose beta is not until Autumn 2027 and whose anti-grind Western design will never print Korean whale margins to cover Pangyo's billion-pound overhead. (Sources: NC IR Earnings Archive; Chosun Biz; PC Gamer)

Then there is Throne and Liberty, which is completely dead at roughly 1,600 to 3,800 concurrent players on Steam, down 99% from its launch peak. Even though the game is a corpse, NC had previously spun it off into an entire subsidiary, FirstSpark Games, carrying roughly 250 employees. When Amazon pulled the plug early and dumped Western publishing back onto NC on 10 November, NC did not stick it in cheap maintenance mode: it absorbed 100% of Western server, support and live-ops costs back onto its own books and immediately announced a six-week content pause to "redesign" the game. Paying 250 developers and Western AWS bills for three thousand players sums up its operational discipline nicely. (Sources: SteamDB; Korea Herald; Maeil Business Newspaper)

Aion 2: the last remnant of Lineage DNA and the AI joke:

That brings us to Aion 2, NC's newest flagship and the last bloated relic of its old Lineage design philosophy. Built originally as a mobile-first Lineage-like before management panicked and Frankensteined it into a manual-action Unreal Engine 5 hybrid, it launched in Korea and Taiwan last November with such a shameless cash shop that developers had to host an emergency apology stream 15 hours later. Sure enough, Korea and Taiwan revenue collapsed by more than 60% in six months, falling from 136.8 billion KRW in Q1 to 71.9 billion KRW in Q2 and 52.6 billion KRW in Q3, with this week's 1st Anniversary Level 55 and housing update looking more like life support than a comeback. (Sources: NC IR Earnings Archive; Chosun Biz; Aion 2 Official Portal)

The global Steam and PURPLE release packs in one of the worst monetisation stacks in modern MMORPGs, stopping just short of literal loot-box gambling only because even NC knew that would leave it dead on arrival in the West. It begins before you even log in, selling $24.99, $49.99 and $99.99 Founder's Packs (roughly £19 to £76, charging more than a full-priced AAA title for a five-day head start on a free-to-play MMO, with pack cosmetics initially locked to a single character and server until early-access outrage forced a U-turn). Once inside, basic MMO economy features like buying on the auction house and using the currency exchange are locked behind a server-bound $14.99-a-month membership (roughly £11.40), while direct player-to-player trading is disabled altogether. NC's official excuse is that paywalling the market and deleting direct trades are "anti-bot measures", which is hilarious on two fronts: NC boasts about its proprietary AI tech’s ‘anti bot’, yet bots immediately swarmed the global servers anyway, forcing over 70,000 account bans in two weeks while bots still pack farming spots and legitimate players get caught in false trade restrictions. (Sources: Steam; NC IR Earnings Archive)

The monthly fee is only the entry gate. On top of the subscription, NC bolted on dual per-character paid battle passes (1,000 to 1,500 Quna each, handing out upgrade materials and currencies as if this were a free-to-play shooter), weekly shop outfits climbing towards $30 (roughly £23 to £25) apiece, and a dye system charging 1,400 Quna (roughly $20 or £15) just to recolour one outfit set. You even have to pay €50.99 (4,000 Quna, roughly £43) to unlock the extra four character slots if you want to play all eight classes, alongside daily paid dungeon-cube keys, resurrection stones and paid server transfers. Worse, the cosmetics are not even purely cosmetic: real money converts straight into in-game Kina through the official exchange, dozens of skins carry direct PvP damage and tolerance stats, every skin feeds permanent stat-boosting collection bonuses (up to a 50% defence boost on an armour slot), and duplicate outfits can be fed into RNG "Skin Combine" gambling rolls boosted by cash-shop Lucky Aura items. (Sources: MetaBot.GG; Steam)

Everything about this structure screams a textbook Korean-to-global harvest strategy, engineered to extract maximum cash upfront from whales and skin buyers precisely because NC itself knows the game has zero legs. That 110.3 billion KRW (roughly $75.2 million or £57.2 million at current exchange rates) gross headline from its first 42 days (before Valve's 20% to 30% Steam cut) hides how fast the wheels came off: daily spending halved after the first two weeks, recent 30-day Steam reviews fell to 51% positive, the game slid down to 10th on SteamDB's global top sellers even after last week's raid gear push and fresh outfits dropping this week, and global players remain stuck at Level 45 with five empty weeks until Season 1 ends in mid-December while Park Byung-moo himself admits overall user churn mirrors Throne and Liberty's collapse. (Sources: NC IR Earnings Archive; SteamDB; Steam)

Still, the best punchline to this entire era sits inside Aion 2's development credits. Back in 2011, NCSoft created Korea's first game-industry AI lab under founder Kim Taek-jin's wife, Yoon Song-yee, an MIT PhD who rose to CSO and President as NC became notorious in Korea for keeping family members in top executive jobs until investor backlash helped push them out of management in early 2024. Over 15 years, NC poured hundreds of billions of won into roughly 300 AI researchers before spinning off NC AI in February 2025 as an independent B2B tech hopeful. (Sources: Hankyoreh; Korea Times)

By 2026, that 15-year investment turned into pure comedy. In January, NC AI finished at the bottom of evaluations and got knocked out in Round 1 of South Korea's national sovereign AI contest. Then earlier this month, financial filings revealed that in the first half of 2026, 94.3% of NC AI's revenue (16.38 billion KRW out of 17.38 billion KRW) came from NCSoft paying internal fees to itself, leaving barely 1 billion KRW (roughly £518,000 or $682,000) in real external sales across six months. Since nobody in the outside world wanted to buy VARCO, NC shoved its failed AI straight into Aion 2's quest text, key art, 3D assets, NPC voices, clunky UI and QA checks, turning its last big flagship into an AI-padded Frankenstein built to sell weekly outfits while the co-CEO buys gift-card apps to pretend the company is growing. (Sources: Bloter; Korea Herald; NC Global Newsroom)