South Korean game publishers Netmarble Games, NCSoft and Gamevil joined the world’s highest earning app publisher club last year, according to global mobile app analysis company App Annie.

San Francisco-based App Annie announced on Thursday that Korea’s Netmarble Games ranked third in the global top 52 mobile app publishers by earnings, followed by U.S. Activision Blizzard and Finland’s Supercell. Other Korean names in the ranking were NCSoft on the 12th, Gamevil 24th, and Kakao 51st.

App Annie publishes The Global Top 52 Publishers list every year and it picks the winners out of 7 million global publishers based on annual revenue earned from paid downloads and in-app purchases on the iOS App Store and Google Play Store. The 2018 ranking is based on revenue earned in 2017.

Chinese IT company Tencent topped this year’s ranking, followed by another Chinese name NetEase Games. Most of the spots were taken by mobile game developers.

App Annie also announced a separate Korean top 30 mobile app ranking with the country’s top mobile messenger app Kakao Talk crowned with the top title. The runner-up was contents platform Kakao Page followed by music streaming service Melon. They are all under Kakao Corp. Mobile game apps were excluded from the ranking because 85 to 90 percent of combined app revenue in Korea was created from the mobile game apps, according to App Annie.

App Annie expected that while game apps would remain the highest earners in the global app market, cryptocurrency-related mobile apps would soon appear on the list. It noted that downloads of cryptocurrency-related apps surged last year, reflecting the current fad over the digital money. The number of monthly users of virtual currency-related apps increased 30 times last year from the previous year, and now the number of digital currency apps reaches 4,800, App Annie’s chief executive Bertrand Schmitt said at a media briefing on Wednesday. More than 1 million users have downloaded cryptocurrency exchange apps such as Bithumb and Upbit apps and the number of monthly users is expected to continue to rise in tandem with the jump in the Bitcoin price, he added.

By Lee Seok-hee and Lee Ha-yeon

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