Nexon Splitting Up Acquisition Of All Shares In The Joint Venture
Nexon splitting up with ‘dungeon dad’ Heo Min? Acquisition of all shares in the joint venture. Nexon acquired all shares of a game development company jointly founded by Heo Min, CEO of Wonder Holdings, who is known as the father of the company’s masterpiece ‘Dungeon & Fighter’.
On the 28th, Nitro Studio announced that its stake in Nexon Korea had changed from 50% to 100%. This is because Nexon purchased a 50% stake in Wonder Games, which was established through a spin-off of Wonder Holdings in 2021.
Nexon said, “By acquiring a stake in Nitro Studio, Nexon will do its best to ensure that its employees can focus on game development smoothly in a stable working environment and to improve user satisfaction by improving the gameplay of ‘Kart Rider: Drift’, which is currently in service. “He said.
Nitro Studio is the developer that developed ‘Kart Rider: Drift’, the sequel to Nexon’s PC game ‘Kart Rider’. It was established in 2020 by Nexon, sharing a 50% stake with Heo Min, CEO of Wonder Holdings, who was an advisor to the company.
CEO Heo has a close relationship with the late Kim Jeong-ju, founder of Nexon, as he was a senior and junior at Seoul National University. He founded Neople in 2001 and led the development of the online game ‘Dungeon & Fighter’, and sold Neople to Nexon in 2008 for 380 billion won. ‘Dungeon & Fighter’ is a successful game with annual sales of 1 trillion won based on its success in the Chinese market.
The performance of Kart Rider: Drift, which Nexon released in January last year, is lower than expected. As a result, Nitro Studio continues to be in deficit. Nexon Korea has provided funding to Nitro Studio several times. Also this month, Nitro Studio raised 6 billion won in short-term borrowings from Nexon. Total borrowings amount to 56 billion won.
The situation at Wonder Holdings is also not good. Wonder People, a game developer under Wonder Holdings, launched ‘Super People 2’ in October last year, but it failed to be a box office success and ended the service less than a year after launch. Acetom, another game developer led by CEO Heo Min, released its new game ‘Building & Fighter’ through Nexon, but is performing poorly.
As this poor performance continued, it is interpreted that Nexon eventually acquired all of the shares and took the step of breaking up.
Another joint venture between the two companies, ‘Devcat’, also changed its shareholding structure. On this day, Nexon announced that it had acquired a 5.54% stake in DevCat from Wonder Games. Nexon explained, “We pursued the acquisition of additional shares for management purposes.” DevCat is developing Nexon’s new game ‘Mabinogi Mobile’, which is scheduled to be released this year. The industry believes that the management structure may change depending on the performance of Mabinogi Mobile.
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