Traffic exchange between mobile projects is a common story. It’s a completely different matter — “draining” the audience from a PC project to a mobile game. Today it became known how NCSOFT approached this case on the international market.
Now the Korean company is preparing for the worldwide release of Lineage 2M. The project is considered to be recreated according to modern mobile patterns of the classic Lineage 2 (with autoboy, gacha and other fashionable “chips”).
The problem is that NCSOFT’s positions outside the Asia-Pacific region are very weak. The company is not really directly represented either in Europe or in the Americas. Most of its revenue, reaching up to $80 million per month, comes from the company’s native South Korea.
In other words, the global launch of Lineage 2M will be difficult for the company. It is necessary to involve an expensive audience, without the possibility of cross-traffic from previous projects.
It is clear that the company plans to purchase traffic and work with local operators (for example, Innova will act as a regional publisher in Russia and the CIS). However, this does not eliminate the need for other attraction tools.
One of the possible solutions may be a new NCSOFT promotion aimed at the core audience of the original Lineage 2, officially operating in Russia since the end of 2008 (since the moment of registration in the game, we have reached the 6 million mark).
The essence of the promotion is the ability to transfer the clan names and user names to Lineage 2M. Unfortunately, there is no question of transferring progress or status, but, for example, it was the synchronization between the web and mobile versions in 2012 that gave the strongest push Candy Crush Saga.
Another help in attracting may be an attempt to position Lineage 2M as a cross-platform game, which in fact it is not. NCSOFT has its own BlueStacks counterpart, which is called PURPLE. And through onboarding in the Lineage of 2M users through an emulator (quite time-consuming due to the additional funnel), the company can achieve an increase in downloads.
Whether it will work — we will find out after the release. As for NCSOFT’s expectations, there is no information about them. The company declined to comment.
According to AppMagic, to date, Lineage 2M in the Asia-Pacific region has earned $850 million. At the same time, its total downloads amounted to around 4.8 million. In other words, ARPU is an astronomical $177.