[Click eStock] "NCSoft Maintains Conservative View... Investment Rating Neutral"

Korea Investment & Securities evaluated NCSoft on the 9th, stating that it will maintain a conservative view until the company releases a product recognized by the market. The investment opinion was kept neutral.

NCSoft released its highly anticipated title, Journey of Monark, on the 4th. Researcher Jeong Ho-yoon from Korea Investment & Securities said, "The number of pre-registrations surpassed 8 million before the release, raising expectations for market success," adding, "Ultimately, similar to Ho-yeon, the results were disappointing compared to the expectations before release. It was a work that found it difficult to meet the raised standards of users by merely relying on the high recognition of its intellectual property (IP) and fandom."

Researcher Jeong pointed out that the disappointment with this new release could lead to a decline in trust in the company’s development capabilities. He analyzed, "Following Ho-yeon, Journey of Monark also received negative evaluations from users, posing a risk of declining trust in development capabilities. With the most important strategy after next year being expansion into various genres and new platforms, simply replicating the style of existing games with low quality could raise doubts about development capabilities and generally lower market expectations for the success of new releases."

He continued, "With reduced visibility of revenue growth through the success of new titles, it is difficult to view performance improvement based solely on cost reduction positively," adding, "It is necessary to increase understanding of the newly attempted genres and adopt development methods suited to them. Until a product recognized by the market is released, we will maintain a conservative view."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.