‘Lineage 2M’ becomes the most popular mobile game

The explosive popularity of “Lineage 2M” is leading the growth of the country’s mobile game industry.

With NCSoft’s “Lineage 2M” and “Lineage M” gaining popularity, “V4” developed by Nexon subsidiary NetGames is also ranked high in application charts. The game was developed by Park Yong-hyun, founder and CEO of NetGames, who was a team leader for “Lineage II.” The success of these mobile games is apparently invigorating South Korea’s gaming industry, which has been long depressed by the World Health Organization’s classification of gaming addiction as disorder and the speculation that the country’s largest game developer Nexon is up for sale.

The massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), whose development was led by NCSoft CEO Kim Taek-jin, was the top-grossing game on Google Play as of Tuesday. Lineage 2M attracted as many as 7.38 million users during its pre-reservation period, the largest ever recorded in the country. Users’ response after the official launch was as positive as before, revitalizing the gaming industry which had not seen a big hit in recent years.

What is notable is that NCSoft’s Lineage M yielded the top position to Lineage 2M in Google Play Store. Before handing over the baton, the former game was ranked first for 892 days upon its release in June 2017. With Park’s V4 coming in third, the chart is now unusually dominated by domestically developed mobile games both directly and indirectly related to Lineage.


Jae-Hyeng Kim monami@donga.com