NCSOFT was more of a garage corporation way back at the begining. I don't even think they were doing games until they stumbled into Lineage and it just blew up. It was Angry Birds, it was Candy Crush, it brought in way more money than their original core business so they dumped that and went full time into MMO development. Lineage II was as big as Lineage for the first few years. Strapped with cash they went looking for other studios to bring in to the fold or support in the west, wanting to get in on the UO and Everquest populations. So they bought ArenaNet, a company founded by 3 guys from Blizzard whose Starcraft RTS was blowing up in Korea. They bought Destination Studios to get Lord British, the man behind the Ultima universe, as an employee. Those were prestigious hires back then. They invested in Cryptic for City of Heroes, NetDevil for Auto Assault, two MMOs well outside of the fantasy comfort zone for MMOs.
But NA/EU weren't all that into their big money makers from Korea. Then WoW hit in the west and that was the end of any major income from Lineage/Lineage II in the west. Their western investments were hit and miss. ArenaNet had a unique business model for the time. City of Heroes was an MMO set in an alternate present, coming on the scene during the early superhero movie revival and did OK for itself in the first few year.
AION came out and did very well in both Korea and overseas. But this was after they got bitten real bad by Tabula Rasa and I think that was the time they became very conservative in western development. Their last big investment was Carbine, who was founded by some of the initial WoW developers, and it's "WoW in Space" MMO WildStar. Sadly they thought that a subscription model could still work and doubled down on the now old WoW model of end game raid content over everything else.
With their income stream somewhat stagnate, they returned looking at success in Korea and Asia first. Blade & Soul, a rather sexy MMO, and expanding into the new and unsaturated Chinese market became their focus. So they looked toward friendly partners in Asia and Nexon was willing, only if they can get some skin in the game with a major stock purchase. NCSOFT's CEO gladly sold them most of his shares in the company he founded. And after two or so years Nexon is now regretting that decision. Their joint development company Nsquare, stopped development on their first game, a tie-in to Nexon's anime style MMO Mabinogi. The only other game they are working on is MapleStory 2, a quasi 3D, vaguely Mindcraft like, sequel to the grindfest MapleStory. That's in CB at the moment.
But as we all know, if you followed any of my posts on NCSOFT's financials, B&S didn't blow up in Korea, except by eating into AION's home numbers. China expansion of B&S and GW2 isn't panning out anywhere near what was hyped. Things aren't as bad as Zynga, Rovio and King. NCSOFT isn't a one hit wonder but it's now are saturated marketplace. They are desperately looking for their next big hit. Lineage is 30% of their income with Lineage 2 and AION being 18%. How many more years can they keep money from Lineage rolling in?
They there are home front problems in the form of the current Korean government wanting to expand their minor online exclusion system and defining Internet addiction as a major problem on the rank of gambling, alcohol and drugs. And to pay for treatment centers for this newly defined addiction is an additional tax on online game companies in Korea.
So what was once a ride to the top for NCSOFT founders have become a sludgefest in a saturated market with a hostile national government and now a hostile partner. It'll be interesting to see what shakes out of this, but in anycase I don't think it'll mean Nexon would be interested in selling CoH. They are just looking for a better commitment from NCSOFT on their joint games.
