From Crossfire to LORDNINE: How Smilegate Became a Mobile MMORPG Player
The company behind Lost Ark and Epic Seven spent two decades as a PC-first studio. Now it publishes some of Korea's biggest mobile MMORPGs. Here is how Smilegate built its mobile line-up, one launch at a time.
For most of its history, Smilegate was a PC company. It was founded in Seoul in June 2002 by Kwon Hyuk-bin, and its first global hit, the shooter Crossfire, came out in 2007 and has been serviced in some 80 countries, with China as its giant. Its second, Lost Ark, became one of Korea's biggest PC MMORPGs after 2018 and a Steam sensation in the West in February 2022.
Yet in 2024, 2025 and 2026, some of the most talked-about Smilegate releases in Korea were mobile MMORPGs. LORDNINE reached No. 1 on both Google Play and Apple's App Store within a week of its 2024 launch, and on September 10, 2026, Smilegate released Eclipse: The Awakening, which Sensor Tower now counts among the top 10 Korean MMORPGs by 2026 revenue.
The mobile foundation: Epic Seven
Smilegate's mobile story did not start with MMORPGs. On November 8, 2018, its subsidiary Super Creative launched Epic Seven, a turn-based RPG with lavish hand-drawn 2D animation that stood out in a market full of 3D games. It became a long-running global hit, reaching about $650 million in worldwide sales by August 2023.
Epic Seven showed that Smilegate could build and run a live mobile game for years, across many countries. That experience mattered when the company turned to Korea's biggest mobile genre.
The publisher model: LORDNINE
LORDNINE shows how Smilegate approaches the mobile MMORPG: as a publisher. The game was developed by NX3GAMES and published by Smilegate Megaport, the company's publishing arm. That lets Smilegate back outside studios with marketing and operations rather than building every MMORPG in-house.
The launch was a big success and a stress test. LORDNINE topped both Korean app stores' grossing charts within a week, but its early days also brought emergency maintenance and client stability problems, a familiar story for Korean MMORPGs that draw huge crowds on day one.
The 2026 bet: Eclipse
Eclipse: The Awakening repeats the model with a different partner: it was developed by NPixel and published by Smilegate. It arrived in a crowded autumn, after Netmarble's SOL: enchant (June) and Com2uS's Zeus: God of Pride (August), and the three together pushed Korea's MMORPG revenue in September 2026 to its highest level in about a year. In that month, the three new launches made up 13.4% of all MMORPG revenue in Korea.
That puts Smilegate in an interesting spot. It does not have a Lineage of its own on mobile, but by partnering with outside studios it can release MMORPGs regularly while its own teams focus on games like Lost Ark.
Why it matters
Korea's mobile MMORPG market has long been dominated by NCSOFT, Netmarble, Kakao Games and Wemade. Smilegate's steady arrival, through a mix of its own games and publishing deals, gives players more choice and gives smaller studios like NX3GAMES and NPixel a route to market.
WGC's take: Smilegate's mobile strategy is less flashy than Netmarble's shotgun approach and less dependent on a single franchise than NCSOFT's. It is a publisher's strategy, built on picking good partners. The test for Eclipse, as for every Korean MMORPG, is the "three-month hurdle". LORDNINE cleared the first part of that race in 2024; Eclipse is running it now.