Lineage M at Nine: How One Mobile Game Owned Korea's Top-Grossing Chart

At midnight on June 21, 2017, NCSOFT switched on 130 servers for a mobile game. It was the largest server count any Korean mobile launch had ever had, and it was not enough. Within hours more than 10,000 players were stuck in login queues, and around 3 a.m. the company had to take the game down for about an hour of emergency maintenance.

By 6:40 a.m., none of that mattered. Lineage M was already the No. 1 grossing app on Apple's App Store in Korea. Nine years later, it is still in the fight for that spot. This is the story of how a phone version of a 1998 PC game became the most stubborn chart-topper in Korean mobile history.

The launch that broke records

NCSOFT opened pre-registration on April 12, 2017, and in about two months 5.5 million people signed up, a record for Korea at the time. The game was a faithful mobile take on the original Lineage, the top-down MMORPG that built NCSOFT: the same classes, the same castle sieges, the same blood pledges, and the same obsession with rare gear.

The first 24 hours brought in 10.7 billion won, the highest first-day revenue any mobile game had recorded in Korea. The previous record holder was Lineage 2 Revolution, Netmarble's hit from December 2016, which had earned 7.9 billion won on its first day. Lineage M beat it by about 35%.

Not everything went smoothly. The night before launch, NCSOFT said the item trading feature, a core part of PC Lineage, would not be ready on day one and would follow in early July after a ratings review. Players also argued about the game's main paid item, Ainhasad's Blessing, which boosts experience, drop rates and adena (the in-game currency). From level 40, entering instanced dungeons used up a Blessing, and many players felt the free supply was far too small. NCSOFT's position was that the free event supply was enough to play.

Thirty months at the top

On Apple's chart Lineage M was No. 1 on day one. On Google Play, which matters far more in Korea, it was No. 2 on day two and took No. 1 on June 23, 2017. It then stayed there until December 1, 2019, a run of roughly 30 months.

Why Google Play matters so much: Korea is a Samsung country. In 2018, according to the Korea Mobile Internet Business Association, Google Play took 63.2% of the Korean app market and Apple 24.8%. Whoever leads Google Play's grossing chart in Korea is, for practical purposes, the biggest mobile game in the country.

For the next year and a half the top two spots on Google Play Korea mostly belonged to the two NCSOFT games. Byline Network described it as the first real crack in the Lineage wall when Netmarble's Ni no Kuni: Cross Worlds, a Studio Ghibli-styled MMORPG, briefly passed Lineage M on June 17, 2021, a week after its June 10 launch. A few weeks later Kakao Games and Lionheart Studio launched Odin: Valhalla Rising, and NCSOFT answered in November 2021 with Lineage W, a global version of the formula.

The money

The numbers behind the "Lineage brothers" are hard to believe. In a March 2023 report, Sensor Tower estimated cumulative worldwide revenue as of February 14, 2023:

• Lineage M: about $4.24 billion
• Lineage 2M: about $1.77 billion
• Lineage W: about $1.05 billion
• Together: more than $7 billion

In the 12 months to February 2023, Sensor Tower's combined Google Play and App Store ranking for Korea read: 1. Lineage M, 2. Lineage W, 3. Odin: Valhalla Rising, 4. Lineage 2M, 5. Dungeon&Fighter Mobile. Three of the top four were Lineage games.

Lineage M was also the most domestic of the three. Only 12.9% of its revenue in that period came from outside Korea, compared with 37.9% for Lineage W. It earned about $406 per download, and its 30-day retention, the share of new players still playing a month later, was about 10%, the highest of the five games Sensor Tower compared.

Who plays, and why it lasts

Lineage M is not a game you play for 20 minutes on the bus and forget. It is a second home for people who played PC Lineage in Korea's PC bangs in the late 1990s and 2000s and now have jobs, families and money. Its economy is built around blood pledges (guilds), castle sieges and a handful of extremely rare items, and that structure rewards players who log in every day for years.

That is also why critics coined the term "Lineage-like" for the many games that copied its formula: auto-hunting, heavy item enhancement, guild wars and big-spending "whale" players. Love it or hate it, it is the most influential design in Korean mobile gaming.

The fall and the comeback

For most of the 2020s Lineage M sat in the top 10 even when it was not No. 1. Then, on November 5, 2025, it lost the top spot on Google Play, and after NCSOFT introduced in-house PC payments that month it slid as low as 12th. Part of that was an illusion: app store charts only count purchases made through the app store, and a KB Securities report estimated that around 30% of the game's revenue now comes through PC payments on NCSOFT's PURPLE launcher.

NCSOFT did not sit still. Over about two years it rebooted six classes (Knight, Gunslinger, Berserker, Dark Knight, Holy Swordsman and Fairy), and on June 4, 2026, after 210 days, Lineage M was No. 1 on Google Play again, climbing from around 7th place in a few days. Its ninth-anniversary update, "PHOENIX: The Firebird of Scorch," followed on June 24.

By the numbers

• 5.5 million pre-registrations before launch (2017)
• 130 servers on day one
• 10.7 billion won first-day revenue
• About 30 months at No. 1 on Google Play Korea (June 2017 to December 2019)
• About $4.24 billion worldwide revenue by February 2023
• 210 days between losing No. 1 (Nov 2025) and regaining it (June 2026)

What to watch

Lineage M has outlived most of the games designed to replace it. The challenge in 2026 is different: younger players prefer anime games, idle RPGs and 4X strategy, and Inven Global counted that about half of the major mobile MMORPGs released in Korea from 2024 to 2026 never reached the Google Play top 10. WGC's take: Lineage M survives not because it is fashionable but because it is a habit for a generation of Korean players. The question for its tenth year is whether NCSOFT can keep that generation while new games, several of them made by its own former staff, try to win them away. If the 2026 comeback is any guide, nobody should write the old king off just yet.