On July 7, the share price of the Korean company NCSOFT sank to 279.5 thousand won ($214.9) apiece. This happened after an unsuccessful beta test of the MMORPG Throne and Liberty, which has been in development for more than 11 years.
According to the Korean edition of Insight Korea, gamers were dissatisfied with the state of the game, and now NCSOFT should solve at least some of the problems as soon as possible. Recall that the release of Throne and Liberty is scheduled for the second half of 2023.
Throne and Liberty is a strategically important project for NCSOFT, says Insight Korea. The fact is that after the success of the Lineage 2M game, Asian gaming companies began to release similar games en masse, and NCSOFT lost part of the audience. With the help of Throne and Liberty, the developers expect to fix the situation.
At the time of writing the news, NCSOFT’s capitalization has sunk to 6.14 trillion won, or about $4.7 billion. This is about the same level it was at in 2017. To understand the scale of the fall, at the peak in February 2021, NCSOFT was estimated 3.6 times higher – at 22.1 trillion won or $16.9 billion.