The analytical agency SensorTower has prepared analytics on the success of mobile games in South Korea for the second half of 2023 and summed up the overall results of the year. Hyper-casual games lead in terms of downloads, but MMORPGs confidently hold the top sales.
In the second half of 2023, MMORPG Lineage M continued to confidently become a leader in sales, despite attempts by a competitor in the form of Night Crows to bypass it. Odin: Valhalla Rising has been showing excellent results for two and a half years and the game does not intend to leave the ratings. Lineage W and Lineage 2M round out the top five, showing stable sales. The only newcomer to this ranking is the idle game Raising Seven Knights (세븐나이츠) from Netmarble, released in September 2023.
But the download rating includes a lot of casual and hyper-casual games, which are most likely unfamiliar to our readers.
But the sales ranking for the entire 2023 clearly demonstrates how Lineage M dominates in sales on Google Play and the Apple Store. You can also notice that Night Crows was behind Odin: Valhalla Rising in the annual count, despite the successful second half of the year for the Crows.
Please note that 억 is a natural number representing 100,000,000. And Lineage M’s sales can be roughly estimated at 380-390 million US dollars for 2023.
Thanks to the sales of its three games, NCSOFT is a confident leader in the ranking of companies in terms of total sales in Google Play and the Apple Store. Following it are Kakao Games with Odin: Valhalla Rising and ArcheAge War. Two football simulators – FC Mobile and EA SPORTS FC Online M – allowed Nexon to take third place. Netmarble had a small hit in the form of Raising Seven Knights: in 4 months the game showed very good sales and became the leader in downloads among new games in the second half of 2023.
But the biggest success in 2023 came from Wemade. Thanks to the success of Night Crows, the company was able to rise from 25th place to 5th place. In March 2024, the company hopes to make good money on the global version of the game.
In conclusion, I would like to note two interesting points:
- Sales in 2023 decreased compared to 2022: in the first half of the year by 16%, and in the second by 3%.
- Foreign companies occupied 20% of the market in 2023 – this is a record figure for the last 5 years.
