Anonymous
10/19/2025, 2:07:54 AM
No.723595751
>>723595035
As a maplestory afficionado (and nexon stockholder on the TYSE) I can explain.
They were grooming soderlund for YEARS, as nexon hosted a ton of EA's online portals for games in korea (and were a publishing partner in china alongside tencent), and promised him a spot on the board of directors, his own studio, and more if he promised to break them into the western market where their biggest titles have been maplestory, combat arms, and then a handful of the mobile choose your own adventure dating game things that were popular like 10 years ago.
It was late 2017 when they announced they had made an offer to soderlund to leave EA and join nexon under condition of networking and info-sharing (not like trade secrets but introducing nexon to western devs and smaller studios. Come 2018, BF5 came out, flopped, and he moved to nexon and founded embark. It was around this time his input helped nexon navigate a major upcoming legal scandal, helped push nexon to support project P3, as he saw extraction games (particularly tarkov at that time) were on the rise. This led to dark and darker which was a whole other thing but lmao you can read that up.
Nexon since covid has been significantly hands off, largely thanks to soderlund, and has seen pretty big profit spikes because of it. They cancelled a shit ton of their indev projects that were doomed to fail after a 6 year stretch of ~1 year releases, that is to say, games that lasted less than one year after release. Something like 20 games nexon published ALL flopped, across mobile and pc. Now they're working on 3 projects at a time, teams are more coordinated, and they've tripled down on teams for major profitable IPs (maplestory, dnf, mabinogi[and vindictus which is mabinogi heroes], and supporting splinter studios (mintrocket, embark).
It also really strengthened their EA support, they still service the only version of fifa (or fc now) in all of asia.
As a maplestory afficionado (and nexon stockholder on the TYSE) I can explain.
They were grooming soderlund for YEARS, as nexon hosted a ton of EA's online portals for games in korea (and were a publishing partner in china alongside tencent), and promised him a spot on the board of directors, his own studio, and more if he promised to break them into the western market where their biggest titles have been maplestory, combat arms, and then a handful of the mobile choose your own adventure dating game things that were popular like 10 years ago.
It was late 2017 when they announced they had made an offer to soderlund to leave EA and join nexon under condition of networking and info-sharing (not like trade secrets but introducing nexon to western devs and smaller studios. Come 2018, BF5 came out, flopped, and he moved to nexon and founded embark. It was around this time his input helped nexon navigate a major upcoming legal scandal, helped push nexon to support project P3, as he saw extraction games (particularly tarkov at that time) were on the rise. This led to dark and darker which was a whole other thing but lmao you can read that up.
Nexon since covid has been significantly hands off, largely thanks to soderlund, and has seen pretty big profit spikes because of it. They cancelled a shit ton of their indev projects that were doomed to fail after a 6 year stretch of ~1 year releases, that is to say, games that lasted less than one year after release. Something like 20 games nexon published ALL flopped, across mobile and pc. Now they're working on 3 projects at a time, teams are more coordinated, and they've tripled down on teams for major profitable IPs (maplestory, dnf, mabinogi[and vindictus which is mabinogi heroes], and supporting splinter studios (mintrocket, embark).
It also really strengthened their EA support, they still service the only version of fifa (or fc now) in all of asia.