Nexon Rumored To Have Approached Electronic Arts With Purchase Offer

Written by: Jason Winter (@winterinformal) | April 26, 2012 5:30 pm

21 Comments

Will your Jedi Knight be fighting mushrooms in Update 1.3?

Probably not, but Gamespot is reporting that MapleStory and Vindictus creator Nexon has made an offer to purchase Electronic Arts for an undisclosed sum of money. The source of the information is the Bloomberg Report, which got its news from “an unnamed South Korean newspaper.” Tread with caution.

Assuming for the moment that this report is true — and EA doesn’t outright deny it — what would this mean for fans of Star Wars: The Old Republic and other EA and BioWare titles like Mass Effect?

On the surface, probably very little. Nexon’s a big company, with over a dozen subsidiary companies, which probably act fairly independently. And having a partner to expand SWTOR into southeast Asia could provide an additional revenue stream that improves the game in the long run.

Somehow, we don’t think Madden 2013 will be all that popular across the Pacific, though.

Until we hear more, it’ll just have to remain speculation. What do you think about this potentially huge deal?

Nexon Rumored To Have Approached Electronic Arts With Purchase Offer

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http://twitter.com/Pross182 Pross182

Consider me skeptical that Nexonn could afford EA.
- http://profile.yahoo.com/F2XRQU4GOV52OTKES2ZLGRBOOE rusty
  
  Id have to imagine that a company like that has a relatively low overhead costs. If that’s the case then them partnered with few other investors could easily put in a realistic offer. The same thing happened to the company i worked for. A large company partnered with several small Investment group bought ours then divided the assets among themselves and sold of the excess. They have 3 billion in assets and Nexxon might only be interested in a portion of those and retaining the Brand. The other investor might just be looking for hardware, office buildings etc or in share in the stock of the corporation it would be creating. After we got bought out we retained our name but had to add the word “new” to it,
- Mike Johnson
  
  You do realize Nexon has 1.7 trillion dollars in revenue in Korea ALONE, right?
- http://www.facebook.com/people/John-R-White/100000469008732 John R White
  
  its truly sad that we as a people in america go about spouting about stuff we clearly know nothing about. hell even i dont know how much money nexon has. im not going to claim to know. what i do know is that korea in general is gaming captial of the world. i base this opinion of mine on the fact that most tourneys involve A:koreans. or B: people who look korean lol. thus by way of deduction i presume that koreans own the game world and nexon is the motherbrain of it all.
http://twitter.com/Latinkuro Latinkuro

If the rumor is true it would mean Stun Wars goes F2P just like they did with STO, Nexon is primarily a F2P P2W style games publisher so no surprises there as to what would happen to any sub based game taken over by Nexon.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Brian-West/100001366383261 Brian West
  
  F2P is not P2W have you not seen LOL they are free to play very popular and very successful you just have to plan it right and you actually make more money on F2P games over subs, on average people spend 22 or more dollars a month on F2P games over the standard 15 dollar a month sub fees of most popular MMO titles
  - http://twitter.com/Latinkuro Latinkuro
    
    look at the comparison you’re making dude,
    league of legends is F2P done the right way, Nexon is known for making most of it’s games P2W. I never said F2P equals P2W, I said nexon makes them into P2W.
http://www.facebook.com/Jstricklolwut Jeremy Strickland

please god no. nexon is the worst gaming company out there. every game they have is pay to win. they have the customer service equal to a potato. did your account get hacked? well to bad, because it takes months to get a copy+pasted response email back from them.
this isn’t just an issue of ea, this is an issue for all gamers with any kind of self respect. nexon is the scum of the industry and has no business having control over major game titles.
- Deamont
  
  so you are saying nexon is worse than the Voted #1 worst company in america EA?
  - http://www.facebook.com/Mitsukakex Nick Tucker
    
    yes… they where voted as worst #1 customer service for many years far as games go. they also do nothing about anything in there games to help the players as a community. it also seems they encourage hacking tot here own scene so that way people pay more money to replay.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Andrew-Gibson/654636349 Andrew Gibson

honestly.. look at how much EA has failed at MMO’s, then look at what Nexon has done…
http://twitter.com/WadeDMcGinnis Wade D McGinnis

When things go into a chain like this, many details get lost and then things get added to spruce (lie) up the articles.
Ghostmosphere

I really hope this is some April fools joke that was lost in the nether and found its self at the end of the month! People think EA is the worst… they obviously haven’t seen Nexon at work.. or not at work lol.
http://www.facebook.com/wFlett William Flett

nexon doesn’t let their “pay to win” idea that runs their economy and pve content, but their pvp is often balanced to exclude these “pay to win” aspects of the game.

(so “pay to be faster, richer, and smoother, but not necessarily be better.” could be more accurate with nexon games, but it’s pretty damn winded)

their “pay to win” aspects are also often accessible through economy’s means, and low levels can break into making respectable money.

the large flak nexon games often get is for the simplicity of their games, and being a rich mofo and spending a ton of money to make your character do damage like it’s 10 levels higher than itself, doesn’t really mean much 10 levels later.
jazzbrownie

Honestly… how could anyone fuck up worse than EA? They’ve got nowhere to go but up.
jayremy

Seems like a very awkward story to begin with, I don’t see Nexon as that big compared to EA, maybe they are I don’t know or follow that.

Nexon has good development, with a weird brand of F2P for people, that works and doesn’t work at the same time in terms of popularity, but makes them money. EA just needs to work on their “goodwill” on the gaming community if they truly want success and fight a better way of trying to make profits besides bait and switching their playerbase or gimping their contracted game developers.

I like what a lot of nexon games offer, I just don’t like the way the handle the payment system of their games, not so much in how it effects me, but in how it deters from having a bigger and better place base.
http://profile.yahoo.com/OTUS45ZJB6TZOXQHPM3EYIAN2I Mickey

I think it is more realistic that the story was mixed up and EA is buying Nexon, just sayin never heard of a big company that has already bought out other big companies getting bought by a smaller independent company.
- ChristopherMitchell1
  
  Except that Nexon is a huge competitor of EA. It probably is smaller here in the US but it is in no way a ‘small independent’ company.
ChristopherMitchell1

Maybe if Nexon bought it the developers could actually return to their former glory, like back when BW made good games…
Tim Girgis

Anyone could do a better job on SWTOR than bioware at this point!
Ryan Weckbacher

Omg…Nexon with Battlefield 3/Swtor/MA3

Doomsday.

Nexon is a terrible company in my opinion.

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