Korea’s top games companies Nexon and NCSoft are to come head-to-head in the fourth quarter, with mobile games V4 and Lineage2M squaring off.
Nexon’s V4 launched Thursday, and in less than five days climbed to the top domain on local mobile games rankings by revenue.
 |
Nexon’s V4 officially launched Thursday. (Nexon) |
On Monday, V4 was the top revenue-generating mobile game on Apple’s App Store, while on Google Play it came second only to longstanding champion Lineage M, threatening to break the latter’s 29-month consecutive winning streak.
On the same day as V4’s launch, NCSoft had announced a sweeping update to the Lineage M game, in an action many industry watchers measured as a means to deflect user attention from V4.
 |
NCSoft added a new champion and new server to Lineage M on Thursday. (NCSoft) |
V4 was developed by Nexon subsidiary NetGames, where founder and CEO Park Yong-hyun is a former NCSoft developer for computer game Lineage 2.
V4 stands for “Victory For,” and is a classic MMORPG with characters whose looks can be customized per player. The game’s special feature is that it has an inter-server system, allowing players belonging to two different servers to meet in combat.
The game’s official Korean fan page on Naver had gathered over 370,000 members as of Monday.
Korea’s games industry is looking on with deep interest on how V4, the “second child” of Park, will compare against NCSoft’s new MMORPG, Lineage2M.
Lineage2M, slated to launch on Nov. 27, is NCSoft’s first new game in almost two years.
While the game uses the same intellectual property and plot as Lineage 2, NCSoft said it is not merely the mobile version of the existing game, but a different, upgraded version.
Nexon reported its net profit for the third quarter rose 79 percent on-year, recording 39.8 billion yen ($365.1 million).
NCSoft will post its third-quarter report Friday.
By Lim Jeong-yeo (
kaylalim@heraldcorp.com)
