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| Trailer image of NCSOFT's "Lineage W" / Courtesy of NCSOFT |
By Kim Jae-heun
It has been a month since NCSOFT launched its new game, "Lineage W," which is available in 12 countries including Korea, Taiwan and Japan. "Lineage W" is receiving favorable reviews for maximizing the excitement offered by the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) genre.
"Lineage W" drew a huge amount of interest around the world before it was revealed. Global presales surpassed 13 million and the game topped the popularity rankings of mobile application stores in eight countries. The game ranked No. 1 in App Store sales just 16 hours after launch and rose to the top of Google Play sales two days later.
It chalked up the highest daily sales performance by an NCSOFT game on the first day of release, far above "Lineage M" with a track record of 10.7 billion won in 2017. KB Securities estimated average daily sales for "Lineage W" to reach 8 billion won in the fourth quarter of this year.
The popularity of "Lineage W" is evident in the fact that the number of worlds available has been expanded six times already. When it was first launched, there were nine worlds powered by 108 servers. However, as more people joined the game, NCSOFT kept increasing the number of worlds to 15 with 180 servers in operation. In contrast to a typical MMORPG, where indicators fall gradually with the number of users peaking on the first day of introduction, the number of servers for "Lineage W" increased by more than 1.5 times over a month.
"Unlike other existing games, Lineage W continues to see major traffic increases, including those of simultaneous users," an NCSOFT official said during a third-quarter earnings conference call. "The total number of users and the proportion of overseas users are also the highest among NCSOFT games."
"Lineage W" players can gather and interact with one server without distinguishing countries in the game. Its artificial intelligence translation program solved the problem of language barriers between users and NCSOFT built a global cloud network to minimize network delays.
