Netmarble launched the large-scale multiplayer online role-playing game Seven Knights 2 in South Korea on Wednesday, focusing on whether the long-awaited game could make up for the company’s poor performance in the third quarter.

As a sequel to Seven Knights released in 2014, Seven Knights 2 continues the storyline of its predecessor, providing a story that players can consume like a movie.

The mobile MMORPG introduces 46 heroes and the player controls a group of 4 heroes instead of one. Players engage in real-time action combat, as opposed to the original turn-based system.

To provide the most realistic movement, Netmarble hired a motion capture company in the Czech Republic to record all the in-game actions of the game.

Seven Knights 2 was ranked as the most popular game on the Apple App Store four hours after the pre-download began on Tuesday.

In the third quarter, Netmarble recorded an operating margin of 13.6%. This is in stark contrast to 34.8% of competitor Nexon. The average operating margin of the top 10 Korean game companies was 27.4% over the same period.

Netmarble mainly published popular games developed by other game companies, and paid a large license fee to other game companies, resulting in a low operating margin.

The Seven Knights series is one of Netmarble’s few and most successful original games. Since its launch in 2014, Seven Knights has recorded 60 million downloads worldwide.

Kim Byung-wook ([email protected])