A recent Massively OP article covers the latest quarterly reports of NC Soft, the South Korean MMORPG publishing giant. At first glance the message of these seems very stark – NC Soft has had a huge profits leap since launching Lineage M, a mobile version of its venerable oldest MMORPG Lineage 1. That game, until recently, was generally the top earner for the studio, despite its age. None of the studios other, much newer, MMORPGs (Lineage 2, Aion, Blade & Soul, Wildstar) could touch its quarterly sales figures. If you look at the slides linked to the article, number 2 in particular, you can see the ~700% increase for this quarter mostly because of the new mobile game. Slide 3 shows the split by IP and the Lineage Revolution mobile game’s ‘Pokemon Go’ style leap into big bucks.

Time will tell whether this phenomenon is, like with Pokemon Go, a…