[Gamasutra rounds up the week's biggest reports on South Korea's booming online games market from This Is Game, the leading English-language site about the country's game industry.]
In our latest round-up of news from South Korea's online games space, we look at Nexon generating more sales than any other Korean game company last year, and WeMade's purchase of several developers.
WeMade buys three social and mobile game studios
Online game developer and operator WeMade Entertainment has acquired three social and mobile game studios: Link Tomorrow (Epic Story, Baseball Wars), Liny Works (Cafestoria), and Fever Studio (Every Town, Every Farm).
This brings the number of development teams WeMade has to five. The company has also announced that it has eight new games releasing for mobile in 2012: Goblin Mobile, Fighters, Silkroad M, StarCity Mobile, Every Farm 2, Epic Island, Cafestoria Mobile, and Braves.
WeMade debuted a new social game brand called "We Social," too. We Social games will be offered to users of popular Korean mobile messenger app Kakao Talk, which WeMade invested $4.6 million into several months ago.
Nexon leads Korean game companies in sales
MapleStory publisher Nexon generated more sales than any other online game company in South Korea last year, making ₩1.21 trillion ($1.07 billion) in revenues, according to financial reports and Financial Supervisory Service filings found by ThisIsGame.
That's nearly double its closes competitor, Neowiz (Crossfire), which brought in ₩667.7 billion ($590 million) in sales last year. 2011's next biggest earners were Hangame portal owner NHN with ₩640.6 billion ($566.3 million), and NCsoft with ₩608.9 billion ($538.3 million).
The companies' presence in China appeared to be a critical factor in their sales and ranking -- Nexon's Dungeon & Fighter is particularly popular there with around 2.6 million concurrent users, while Neowiz's Crossfire has about 3.5 million concurrent users in the country.
Mobile companies Gamevil and Com2us didn't make it into South Korea's top ten rankings, but they were positioned at #12 and #14 respectively. If they were to break into the top ten in 2012, it would be the first year a mobile publisher made it into the list.
[This story was written with permission using material from ThisIsGame Global, the leading English-language site about the South Korean game industry.]
It's well deserved on Nexon's part. Korean MMOs were a copy of the Lineage 2 model for the longest time, just like we get EQ/WoW clones here. However with games like Atlantica and Dragon Nest they showed more innovation in the MMO market than anybody in the past few years. Nexon's games deserve alot more attention on the western market, especially Dragon Nest.
