Throne and Liberty developer NCSoft initiates corporate split-off plan with reported layoffs and cancellation of Project M

NCSoft is about to split into four "privately held companies," pending finalization on November 28 in a shareholder meeting. A Korea-based game developer and publisher, NCSoft is practically a household name in the Korean MMO space, being tied to several milestone titles, including Lineage, Aion, and Guild Wars 2.

If it was somewhat bottled in the East, the recent success of Throne and Liberty's global launch has brought their brand back to mainstream prominence among Western MMO players.

Despite Throne and Liberty's impressive Western numbers though, the financial projections are headed the way of a "chronic" deficit. NCSoft's co-CEOs told their staff as much via mail, according to a report from Yonhap (machine translation):

"As a result of operating in a way that most of the manpower and functions are concentrated at the headquarters, financial performance has continued to deteriorate and we are at risk of becoming a chronically loss-making company."

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Going forward, Throne and Liberty developer NCSoft will have four subsidiaries working on separate projects

In terms of numbers, NCSoft's latest project Throne and Liberty is doing better than some would have anticipated. About a month into its release, the game is peaking at almost 200k players just on Steam, which means the total figure across all platforms is much larger.

Notwithstanding the success, the last publicly available financial report (Q2 2024) shows rather concerning figures. The operating profit fell 75% year-on-year, while their total revenue is down 16% compared to Q2 2023 (down 7% compared to Q1 2024).

The numbers in Q2 2024 were concerning for NCSoft execs (Image via NCSoft)

Earlier this week, NCSoft put out a blog post confirming the news of an internal corporate restructuring, which will involve "project closures, staff relocation, and a voluntary retirement program."

The post lays out their broader plan of this "internal realignment," splitting the company into three studios and an AI research branch. These are:

• Studio X will continue to maintain and improve NCSoft's latest hit, Throne and Liberty, which recently had its global release.
• Studio Y will be refocused on the development of project LLL, which is planned to be a live-service looter at the moment.
• Studio Z will manage the development of TACTAN, a real-time strategy game.
• NC Research, their current AI research and development division, will be registered as a new company, NC AI. They will continue the development of NCSoft's proprietary AI tech, including VARCO LLM.

To accommodate for this strategic shift, there has been an undisclosed (as of yet) number of layoffs, adding to the ledger of a remarkably dire year with industry-wide layoffs in AAA gaming.

According to a Game Meca report following the NCSoft press release, they will sunset the free-to-play mobile game Battle Crush and cancel the development of Project M, an interactive adventure game reminiscent of Detroit: Become Human.