Japan's Nexon Attempting to Buy Out EA?
 

Electronic Arts (EA) had a good day at the markets, on Thursday morning, following a report in a South Korean daily which claimed that Japan's Nexon Corporation is in a bid to buy it out. This report was mirrored by Bloomberg video on Thursday morning as markets opened Stateside. EA shares are responding strongly to the rumor: the game maker’s shares have spiked $1.22, or 8.1%, to $16.23. EA has a market-cap of about US $5 billion, while Nexon's is around the equivalent of US $8.3 billion. Headquartered in Japan, Nexon is a predominantly Korean company, which specializes in development and distribution of online games.

http://www.techpowerup.com/img/12-04-27/278a_thm.jpg

Source: Forbes

If this happens, expect all of EA's games to become Pay2Win games (albeit Free2Play). EA already has some in existence, but it will only get worse, much worse.

Good grief, it can be worse than it already is? :(

i have respect for nexon, a little, but respect. I have none for EA...

Same here.

EA is focusing on tons of DLCs for its games and one of its games, Simcity, will be online only...

Now Nexon, an online games developer/distributor is seeking to buy EA?

How poetic.

Nexon CEO to Nexon board members -" I hate Origin, it ruins my BF experience .. let's buy em out and delete it :cool: !"

I know this is a broad generalization, but I have seen the Japanese as makers of quality game titles since I was a kid. If for nothing else maybe we'll get a good JRPG out of this!!! :rockout:

That would be utter heaven.

I don't care who buys out EA as long as Origin is shuttered or at least the EA execs get their heads out of their butts and start trying to sell games again instead of promoting their broken piece of garbage.

Japanese game studios have been struggling with relevancy for quite a few years now, and they openly admit it.

Origin ain't going anywhere. It's EA's answer to Steam, Impulse, and Good Old Games. Every publisher is going to have an online retail service within 10 years if they don't already.

And just like the iTunes wars last decade...eventually most will shutter and we'll only be left with the top services. Me too businesses don't work unless you can do something better than your competitor. Origin has...*Gabe pause*...ummm, orange/white color scheme? :laugh:

Wow you should see the crap Konami and Capcom have shoveld out in the past 5 years.

EA is massive, its funny because EA snap up developers and now someone is going to buy them up.

Nexon is a Korean company!

Yes same could be said about steam to when it 1st started as it was a piece of crap too. Origin is no worse than steam is except the fact that it has teething issue's which is normal for early stages.

i am surprised EA did not start it a loooong time ago to be honest, and yes i am sure to most will start now in one form or another and we will all have to see what happens at the end if we still care by then.

Always .... money minters have shark teeth :D

p.s. (@JP) for less mining oriented people as myself: word-of-the-day aint pay2win its pay2play afiaUnderstood ;) Really grieving news, to keep the story short :(

And most of us dont care who has the longest one, its multinational cartel tbe ;)

an option to install games on other drives than origin is on, something steam lacks.

I though that EA was one of the biggest game publishers out there, and that was the reason for their less than stellar treatment of customers.

So... a crappy company might get bought by an equally crappy company... yay...

I've been with Nexon for a long time, ever since they took over Maple Story from their subdivision Wizet (until I quit when I was like 15). Believe me when I say this, Nexon does not give a damn about their player base.

They have gotten better since then. I remember when they would literally strong arm the gMS Beta players into things, but since then they have focused a little more on making the game exciting and interesting, and it's definitely a lot better than it once was. I honestly had no idea Nexon was bigger than EA, that blows my mind...

well so then if the deal goes through, nothing will change :D

Yay the deluge of MMOs over here would finally spill over to the West! :laugh:

Unlike music where the industry has virtually no impact on the playing medium, the game industry can make the target computers protect IP for them. This is why you won't see an "iTunes war," every publisher that can afford to will have their own e-store software which you have to install to play their games. If you want to play any game EA sells, then you must tolerate Origin. If you want to play any game Valve sells, then you must tolerate Steam. The list goes on. Until a high court says that you can't force a customer to install non-product (e.g. Steam) software in order to use the product that was lawfully purchased (e.g. Portal), this corpate raid of your computer is going to get much worse, not better.

Music could have easily accomplished that using locked down proprietary file formats, which I'm actually surprised they DIDN'T do.