By Patrick Garratt

No, the MMO isn't dead. NC's Aion 2, having already launched in South Korea and Taiwan last November, released in the US, Europe and Japan on October 5 and passed 400,000 concurrent players on Steam and Purple, the publisher's own distribution platform, on day one. NC has said since that the global version of Aion 2 generated KRW 110.3bn (roughly $80m) in sales between September 30 and November 10, covering every market outside Korea and Taiwan. Not bad for an apparently forgotten genre.

There are some obvious questions for Daniel Lafuente, director of operations at NC America, the fledgling NC western branch partly charged with bringing the firm's Asian content to the global audience. Has the game been modified over the previously existing Korean and Taiwanese version? How did the relationship between NC eastern and western operations facilitate such success? Given the seemingly risky plan of bringing a major new Asian MMO to Europe and America has obviously worked, are we going to see more of the same? 

Is the MMO back for good?

No second chances

This isn't the first time we've spoken to Lafuente. When he pitched Cinder City to Knowledge at Gamescom this year alongside BigFire Games CEO James Bae, he showed an encyclopaedic knowledge of online games. When asked about the Aion 2 launch, he describes himself as a "big MMO fan," that NC "is an MMO company," and that he's been playing MMOs for more than 20 years. Tellingly, the aspect he immediately points to as creating the correct environment for the success of Aion 2's release in the west is technology, not content.

"We had what I would describe as a remarkably smooth launch from a technical point of view," he says. "It's one of those classic IT problems. Nobody cares about the IT guy unless something's wrong."

He's well aware of the lack of tolerance among consumers in the live-ops space, especially with an F2P title: "A lot of people will just come try to play, and if it's not there, you lost them forever." Everything was put in place at NC America, including visiting staff from NC's Korean operation and endless technical preparation, to ensure that no one would have a bad play experience on launch day. "I've never been more impressed, to be honest, with an MMO launch from that point of view," he says.

A year's head start

Heavy expertise in the live-ops space, then, enabled NC to exact a flawless technical launch of Aion 2 in the west. Players in 2026 demand online games that don't collapse under pressure. Cultural differences in the way eastern and western audiences approach MMOs, however, present a more complex issue that NC is particularly well placed to address.

"PvE is absolutely leading the way in the west," says Lafuente. "It's the number-one reason that people are involved in the game. They really love the PvE element Aion 2 has to offer, and that's something that of course we're going to keep expanding… We already knew this just from our expertise of publishing MMOs in the west previously."

While the game has been altered in light of the tendency, with PvP in the western version designed to favour skill as much as possible over gear ("We adjusted some of our gear normalisation for PvP"), the major changes have been in terms of the MMO's business model.

"The game that launched for us is not the same game that launched in Korea," Lafuente says. NC is "just continually evaluating our business model. Before launch, we made some pretty heavy changes to the business model to make it more western-friendly for our global players, and that's something that we'll continue to evaluate over time and adjust."

Changes in the consumer-facing business aspects of Aion 2 in the west have been a critical point in readying the game for launch, and NC has taken this seriously. The company has been as "upfront and honest" about what Aion 2 was, "especially as it related to the business model. As early as June or July, we were already publicly disclosing our full business model to players. We were being very direct about it. We were telling them about what changes we had planned, and we were listening if more changes were needed. And we did, in fact, make more changes after we got player feedback… For example, in our Early Access Founder's Packs, we added the subscription after the fact, because there was a lot of player feedback about how they needed to include one month of membership."

Going it alone

Creating a bulletproof technical environment and having the bravery to adapt original content geographically means NC is effectively writing the rulebook on how to bring Asian MMOs to western audiences. In addition, the setup of having the game launching a year previously to the western version allows the company a unique pipeline of content, avoiding another legacy pitfall for any MMO: "Of course, we have the benefit right now in the global version of one year's worth of backlogged content coming from the Korean version… If you look at the Korean and Taiwanese version, the pace at which they are bringing new content is just incredible. They're very, very dedicated to live-ops for this game and maintaining their players through a healthy stream of content."

To date, NC America appears to have done everything right. Lafuente knows it. Objectively, there are very few Asian companies, as he notes, "that can really come to the west on their own, with their own company, and have this type of success… NC is now a global force to be reckoned with, in my opinion."

And it obviously isn't going to stop here. Aion 2 is just the first execution of a long-term strategy executives started to form with the arrival of NC America in 2023. "I do feel like we have a unique opportunity as NC to take all of the stuff that we've done to be successful in Korea and really break through in the global market. And I think Aion 2 is absolutely showing the first step into that right now."

While NC America is not restricted to MMOs, as we saw at Gamescom with MMO-shooter hybrid Cinder City, Aion 2 has proved beyond doubt that desire for the genre still exists. It's not that players don't want MMOs – they want MMOs that are suitably adapted geographically and don't explode every time there's a user spike. The demand is real: the job is supply.

"This narrative that's out there about MMOs being dead, or whatever, it's not because there's a lack of interest from players… You saw from our launch, they're craving MMOs."

He laughs at the suggestion that NC is spearheading an MMO resurgence, that it "would be a little too pretentious of me to say something like that." But he's comfortable in the success of the execution of a global plan based on a unique situation: "The biggest thing we have going for us is 30 years of lessons, of learnings, of technical infrastructure… really dedicated to MMOs."

He concludes: "More good things are to come. That's how I feel."