Netmarble's Shotgun Year: Five Launches, One Big Hit and a Lighter Balance Sheet

Some publishers bet everything on one game. Netmarble has always preferred volume. In the first half of 2026 alone it released an idle RPG, two anime-styled RPGs, a Game of Thrones action game and a brand-new MMORPG, while also selling assets to shore up its finances.

The results were mixed, and that is what makes Netmarble's year interesting. Its June MMORPG SOL: enchant became the highest-earning mobile game launched in Korea in 2026, with about $90 million by October, according to Sensor Tower. Several of its other launches fell short of expectations. Here is how Korea's busiest mobile publisher is playing the game.

The 2026 line-up

Netmarble's first half looked like this:

• Stone Age Idle (March 3): an idle RPG built on its long-running Stone Age IP, which topped Apple's Korean popularity chart within eight hours and later ranked No. 4 by revenue in Korea.
• The Seven Deadly Sins: Origin (March): an RPG based on the anime and manga series.
• Mongil: Star Dive (April): an action RPG.
• Game of Thrones: Kingsroad (May): an action RPG whose Steam player count peaked at 17,224 at launch and had dropped to the 4,000s by mid-June.
• SOL: enchant (June 18): an MMORPG from Alt9, a new studio formed by former Lineage M developers, which topped both Korean app stores within a day.

Newstomato reported in June that The Seven Deadly Sins: Origin and Mongil: Star Dive had performed below expectations. That put extra weight on SOL: enchant, and it delivered.

The strategy: many shots, familiar names

Look at the list and a pattern appears. Almost everything Netmarble released is built on a known name: its own IPs (Stone Age, Seven Knights, RF Online, which it bought in 2020), or licensed ones (Game of Thrones, The Seven Deadly Sins). The company also covers almost every genre, from idle to MMORPG to action RPG, and it now releases many games on PC as well as phones.

It is a portfolio approach. Not every launch has to be a hit, as long as a few are big ones. In 2024 that hit was Solo Leveling: Arise; in 2025 it was Seven Knights Re:BIRTH; in 2026 it is SOL: enchant.

Fixing the balance sheet

Netmarble's big acquisitions in the late 2010s, including a controlling stake in home appliance rental firm Coway agreed in 2019 and a stake in HYBE (then Big Hit Entertainment) in 2018, left it carrying a lot of debt. 2026 shows the clean-up continuing:

• Net borrowings fell from about 1.62 trillion won in 2022 to about 391.6 billion won at the end of March 2026.
• The company sold further HYBE shares, most recently 5.86% in February 2026 for about 320.8 billion won.
• It announced plans to sell its headquarters building in Seoul's Guro district for about 697.7 billion won.

Marketing, meanwhile, went up. Netmarble's marketing costs in the first quarter of 2026 were about 168.2 billion won, up 47.3% year on year, the price of launching so many games so quickly. A KB Securities analyst, Lee Jong-geon, told Newstomato that marketing efficiency had held up over two years but that the structure would be hard to sustain, and that SOL: enchant's early success still needed to be proven over the long run.

What's next

Netmarble has more on the way. Newstomato listed Solo Leveling: Karma and a Shangri-La Frontier game among four titles planned for the second half, and the company showed Solo Leveling: Karma and Shangri-La Frontier at Tokyo Game Show 2026.

WGC's take: Netmarble's approach is noisy, expensive and occasionally frustrating for fans who watch good ideas get lost in the crowd. But it works often enough. SOL: enchant gave the company the hit it needed in 2026, and with debt falling, Netmarble has more room to keep taking shots. The real test, as the KB analyst noted, is whether SOL: enchant is still earning in 2027.