Nexon sells Gloops

Nexon is giving up on Gloops. After acquiring the mobile development studio in 2012 for ¥36.5 billion (more than $468 million at the time), it agreed December 24 to sell the subsidiary to GR Drive for ¥1 ($0.01).

In announcing the sale, Nexon noted that Gloops was "one of the leading mobile social game developers" when it initially acquired it, adding that its purchase was expected to boost Nexon's mobile gaming business.

"However, due to the rapidly changing mobile social game environment, keeping up with such changes in game development and operations has continued to be more difficult than initially expected," Nexon said.

The company noted that generating stable revenue from Gloops would require too much in the way of management resources, so it would rather drop the studio and play more to its strengths, giving multiplayer online game titles as one such example. Gloops has seen revenues decline more than 30% in each of the past two years, while its net losses have been in the hundreds of the million of yen for the past three years.

As for the acquiring company, Nexon said "the environment is ready for the generation of high synergy" between Gloops and GR Drive, which has worked as a support studio on visual elements of titles like Fate Grand/Order, Kirby Star Allies, and Daemon X Machina. GR Drive is primarily owned by Kenji Goshima (director of Star Ocean: Blue Sphere) and Takayuki Suguro (director of Resonance of Fate).