Smilegate

Smilegate is one of the Top 5 video game companies in South Korea. Its yearly revenue in 2020 surpassed 1 trillion KRW. The current number of employees is approximately 3,300, and the number is highly increasing every year.

Smilegate, along with Krafton, is admired by new and middle-market game development companies as it managed to rise to a position right below the dominant 3N (Nexon, NCSOFT, Netmarble) in the South Korean gaming industry with the success Crossfire and Lost Ark.

Smilegate subsidiary Stove is dedicated to indie game game developers.^[4][5][6]

Crossfire is the world’s most popular online FPS that has reached more than 8 million concurrent users around the world. Crossfire is being serviced in 80 countries worldwide including China, Brazil, Vietnam, Northern America, and Europe.

Every year, Smilegate organizes an international Crossfire tournament with a prize pool of approximately 1 billion KRW titled CFS (CrossFire Stars). CFS has the largest scale among all tournaments held by video game companies in South Korea.

Smilegate made tremendous amount of revenue from Crossfire ever since its release. With the success of Crossfire, Smilegate was nominated as one of <THE TOP 30 DEVELOPERS>^[7] by Game Developer.

According to a list^[8] made in 2014 by SuperData Research, Crossfire made the most amount of revenue among all F2P games worldwide.

Crossfire was the world’s most played game until League of Legends took the first place in 2017.

Lost Ark is a PC MMORPG developed by Smilegate RPG. Lost Ark was first released in South Korea in 2018 costing approximately 100 million KRW during the 7 years of development. It became increasingly popular in 2021 and became one of the top trending games in South Korea.

In February 2022, the game was launched in Northern America and Europe via Steam. Lost Ark reached more than 1.32 million concurrent users on Steam, becoming the most played game on the platform. The record of 1.32 million concurrent users is the second place in the entire history of Steam, the first place being 3.25 million concurrent users of PUBG: Battlegrounds. Considering that Lost Ark was only released in North America and Europe, some argue that Lost Ark was more impactful than PUBG: Battlegrounds, which was released in China as well.

These are the games developed or published by Smilegate. Publisher and release dates are for South Korea unless otherwise noted.

• Official website