Frank "verve" Kuhn

NCsoft is a South Korean-based online computer games company. Founded in March 1997 by T.J Kim, the person responsible for the Korean word processor, Hangul, NCsoft produces massive multiplayer online role-playing games or MMORPG for short. It’s most famous being Lineage, Guild Wars and most recently, Aion.

The company’s first foray into program production was the NC HTML editor which was soon followed by its first MMORPG, Lineage. Released in September 1998, Lineage was initially Korean-based but by December 2000 it had over 100,000 concurrent users, the first time ever, and this allowed them to expand the product to Taiwan, China, Japan, Europe and the USA.
This expansion preceded the creation of a US subsidiary, NC Interactive, which, in April 2004, allowed NCsoft to take the unprecedented step of releasing two MMORPG’s on the same day, the City of Heroes and Lineage II. Despite mixed reviews from the critics, both managed to gain a healthy number of subscriptions with Lineage II having over 600,000 unique in South Korea by March 2007.

In April 2005, the company released the Guild Wars Series; a MMORPG with no subscription model and by April 2009 had announced the sale of over 6 million units worldwide.

After such widespread success with previous games, the announcement of NCsoft’s latest production, Aion, was met with a huge anticipation. Released first in South Korea in November 2008 the game was estimated to have 3.5 million users by April 2009 in South Korea alone. Just before its release worldwide in September 2009, it had over 500,000 pre-order sales in the USA and Europe.

With such a devoted South Korean following, the future looks bright for Aion and NCsoft but with rival production, Warhammer, having more USA and Europe pre-order sales and now sitting at 100,000 subscriptions the real test is to come. Will Aion be as big a hit as Lineage and Guild Wars? Only time will tell.

Notice: All the above mentioned names are trademarks of their owners.