NCSoft Offers Historical Look At Its Revenue, Which Has Shot Up 1,700x Since 1998

Quarterly financial statements from game companies follow a pretty regular schedule. Normally we'd expect to receive them starting in about two weeks, but today I had reason to check something from NCSoft and found ... well, not what I was looking for. Long story short: NCSoft has really upgraded its investors' information.

First, my old bookmark didn't work, but a little digging led me to the new and fancy NCSoft landing page and its investors' relations page. I can still find all the old reports and investors' calls here, but there's a new section, IR Presentations, which provides some additional insights into the company's operations. (There's also a section devoted to yearly audit reports, each of which are extremely long and detailed and should be of great service to anyone having difficulty sleeping.)

The most recent presentation, issued in February, covers much of the same information that we covered two months ago, once you dig down a few pages. The early pages are devoted to a look at the overall global games market, mostly using numbers obtained from Newzoo, which shows that mobile games (45%) and Asia-Pacific (47%) each account for nearly half of revenue worldwide.

Then NCSoft provides additional information regarding its own organization and financials. 50% of the company is owned by foreign investors, with NCSoft management (12%), NPS (probably Korea's National Pension Service) (12%), Netmarble (9%), domestic institutions (8%), treasury shares (6%), and retail investors (3%) making up the other half.

Page 4 has probably the most interesting new chart in the entire document. It shows NCSoft's yearly revenue from its inception in 1998, when it brought in just 1 billion South Korean won -- about $723,000. In 2019, that figure was 1.7 billion won, or about $1.4 billion. Suffice it to say, the company has grown a bit.

(A-bomb, however, to not putting certain games on that chart; it might be that they only wanted to focus on games that are still in production, but that could then include the original Guild Wars, even if it doesn't count City of Heroes ... or Tabula Rasa, Auto Assault, and WildStar, which I could understand NCSoft not wanting to remember.)

Somewhat less interesting, costs are also presented in chart form, and, if the Newzoo numbers weren't enough, NCSoft continues to let us know that mobile gaming is big business for them by showing off how many of their games are in the top 10 -- and more are to come (as one departs).

So yeah, I've just spent nearly 400 words talking about months-old numbers, but it's been a bit of a slow day and I needed something to go off about. At least when the current quarterly numbers are revealed in a few weeks, we'll have more to talk about. We can all get excited about that, right? Right?!