Nexon recently hosted its financial conference for investors and analysts and provided some interesting information about its upcoming games and business, including a snippet about the upcoming mobile Final Fantasy XI reboot code-named Final Fantasy XI R.
First of all, for those who have been wondering, Final Fantasy XI R is still in the works, as showcased in the publisher’s pipeline, but it doesn’t appear among the games that will be released in 2020.
You can see the future pipeline below, and the games planned for 2020 in the second slide. Incidentally, it also confirms that Final Fantasy XI R should be coming west.
We also hear that Nexon has been “resetting the strategic pillars” of its global business based on four tenets.
The first is focusing on a portfolio of fewer but bigger fully online multiplayer games and virtual worlds.
The second is enabling them to be played across multiple hardware platforms, PC, consoles, and mobile.
The third is leveraging the company’s substantial IP portfolio to generate long-lasting games with significant recurring revenue.
The fourth is placing bets, as appropriate, on new IP that the company believes are really special.
One example of this new IP drive is the acquisition of Embark Studios.
Products based on these four tenets will start rolling out in 2020.
Speaking about the new game by Embark, Nexon will talk “a lot more” about it later this year. It’s a “multiplayer co-op action game” that the publisher believes is “really exciting.” They also think that the game will “change online games in the west.”
We also hear more of how Nexon is looking beyond mobile platforms and PC into consoles and cloud gaming. They promise to be “aggressive” about it.
“Nexon is well-positioned to lead the next wave of online games as platform providers invest heavily in the game business and build a much bigger addressable market for us.
I talked about mobile before, but it’s also true about advances in the console and cloud-based technologies from newer entrants such as Google and Amazon.
All of these platform providers are spending billions to bring high-end game platforms to consumer mass markets way beyond the previous online business which was largely focused on PC.
Because of all this, we see big opportunities to get our online games and virtual worlds in the hands of at least ten times as many players as there were previously, and we will be aggressive in leaning into these opportunities.”
It’s worth mentioning that, while this talk about consoles and multiple platforms is promising, the Final Fantasy XI reboot is still marked as mobile-only in the presentation. We don’t know if this will change going forward.
KartRider: Drift is the first example of the new console drive. It’s built from the bottom up to be fully online, with a lot of features that players “haven’t seen in either casual or hardcore racing games.” According to Nexon, no other game has the same set of features.
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