The South Korean game publishers, Nexon and NCsoft would put together a bid wish to release on Valve. They would together 893 million dollars willing to pay for the studio behind Half-Life and the lucrative Steam platform. NCsoft denies.
According to the South Korean Joongang News are Nexon and NCsoft, two major Korean publishers, in conversation with the Valve. The two companies would together have the Us developer want to take over. The three parties were to each other at the end of september in Hawaii have spoken to talk about a merger between the companies. Spokespeople of Nexon and Valve refuse to go on the rumors. A spokesman for NCsoft says that the rumor is not true.
Valve is one of the few large, independent game developers. The studio was founded in 1996 by former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, and achieved quickly success with Half-Life. Followed by hits such as Portal, Team Fortress, Left4Dead, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The studio is especially interesting because of Steam, the successful downloadplatform that Valve controls. Because Valve is not publicly traded, it needs no bottom line to publish, but according to business magazine Forbes has Valve with Steam 70 percent in the hands of the market for downloadgames for pc, a market that is estimated to be worth $ 4 billion per year.
Nexon is primarily known for free playable online games like Maple Story. The company was founded in 1994 in South Korea and has pioneered in the free2play-model, that in the past decade of the Korean market overwaaide to the western. It made Nexon a financial success. The company relocated its headquarters from Seoul to Tokyo, took out more than a billion dollars from investors and spent 688 million dollars to the purchase of a majority stake in NCsoft, another Korean publisher, which is known for of mmog’s as a Lineage, and the last month has appeared Guild Wars 2.
It is not the first time that Nexon would try to use an acquisition foot on western ground. In 2010 the company plans have had to Electronic Arts to buy. The share price of the American publisher rose significantly as a result of the rumors, but the acquisition did not go through. Because Valve is fully owned by the founders can Nexon and NCsoft, the company did not take over shares to buy. It is, therefore, the question whether Newell and his associates with the Asian publishers want.
