Nexon game offline over real-money trading
Free-to-play MMO Mabinogi taken offline due to crackdown on currency harvesting
Korean online publisher Nexon has taken its popular MMO Mabinogi offline as part of a crackdown on unauthorised real-money trading (RMT).
According to a report on This Is Game Global, the game was taken offline on October 4 after a sharp increase in RMT activities, including the use of bots to harvest in-game currency.
Players were only warned an hour in advance of the event, but Nexon has pledged to compensate its customers for the downtime. The company is now implementing new security measures to find the culprits and prevent such practices in the future.
Nexon is one of the leading advocates of the free-to-play model, boasting more than 96 million users for its flagship game, Maple Story.
It is currently expanding its operations in the mobile market, with CEO Daniel Kim telling GamesIndustry.biz in March that it has set a goal of "double-digit millions" of players.