







Lost Ark is off to a great start in Korea, where it entered open beta in November 7, 2018. In just two months, this highly anticipated MMORPG earned Smilegate RPG 33.297 billion won in 2018. This translates into over $26 million dollars, estimated to come from sales only. Not too bad for a couple of months of service.

However, these figures need some context. Operating expenses for Lost Ark were over $51 million dollars during 2018, so there is a clear gap that previous years probably helped to smooth out – Lost Ark license deals with Tencent in 2015 for China and Mail.Ru for Russia brought a lot of income to the company.









But considering the interest in Lost Ark, which ranks as one of Korea's top games, it's easy to see that the profit will skyrocket during 2019. And I'm not even talking about the revenue that Smilegate will earn from the guaranteed western release, bringing Lost Ark to North America and Europe. During 2019?









