Disney is looking to return to gaming in a big way, if speculations and rumors are to be believed.
The media giant has certainly been purchasing IPs and studios left and right, with its most recent acquisition being 20th Century Fox. This move has been seen as a direct answer to the media streaming question, as Disney is looking to release its newest venture, Disney+, later this year. Disney+ acts as Disney’s very own streaming platform, and will carry with it the entirety of Disney’s library, as well as their acquisitions, including the recently acquired Fox. The streaming service will also launch on all current-gen consoles, including the Switch, news which may lay credence to the following report.
While other tech and gaming giants such as Amazon, Comcast, Electronic Arts, and Tencent have reportedly expressed interest in purchasing the South Korean publisher Nexon, it looks like Disney will be the one to close the deal. According to a report from the Korea Herald, where Nexon was founded, the company’s chairman Kim Jung-ju has personally approached a high-ranking Disney executive to sell his and his wife’s majority stake in the company, which is 98.64 percent, for a cool $13.2 billion.
An interesting quote that further lends credence to the story dates back to 2015, in which Kim Jung-ju states his admiration for Disney.
“What I envy the most about Disney is that they do not force money out of kids … (consumers) gladly pay Disney. Nexon has a long way to go. Some people hate Nexon to death,” Kim Jung-ju was quoted as saying in an anecdote in Nexon’s foundation story, “Play,” published in 2015. He was referring to the common practice of effectively requiring players to make in-game purchases.
It’s unclear what the selling point of Nexon would be if Kim Jung-ju is indeed offering to sell his stakes on the company. Nexon is more widely known in Korea than in the west, and one of the biggest ventures they had here was in the form of publishing LawBreakers, developed by Cliff Bleszinski’s now-defunct Boss Key Productions. The game fell hard, and was the primary reason for Blezsinski’s departure from the industry; LawBreakers was subsequently written off as a loss for Nexon.
In spite of this, Nexon does remain a successful publisher, and if Disney does bank the deal, we can possibly see them being repurposed to expand success to the west.
