Nexon Western Expansion Hinges On ‘Extraction’

Those who know Nexon recognize it as one of the true pioneers of bringing free-to-play to the West with games like Maple Story and Sudden Attack. Now that the category has a foothold in the US and Europe, the Korean game company is making moves to grow its share of the market by investing in Western development. That’s what its partnership with Splash Damage to publish free-to-play shooter Extraction represents. Despite its success in free-to-play and even the shooter genre, Nexon says it sees challenges ahead with convincing some in the free shooter community, and especially diehard fans of Splash Damage’s previous games, that this marriage is going to birth the next alpha dog of the genre.

We had a chance to talk with Nexon America CEO Min Kim shortly after Extraction was unveiled, and he voiced a surprising early reaction to the announcement.

“I can be completely honest and say that players are probably concerned about the partnership between Nexon and Splash Damage,” Kim said. “Part of it just has to do with the fact that Splash Damage has a partner. If Splash Damage was running the game entirely by themselves then their inner circle of players would feel that Splash Damage is making all the calls, they don’t have to water down any of their decisions and make mistakes that way. When we announced this partnership there was a little bit of that.”

Maple Story is the game that helped put Nexon on the map here, and for many it was their first taste of the free-to-play model. The game isn’t exactly the kind of freemium fare that Western gamers have since embraced. That might be where some of the concern lies in Splash Damage’s player community. The West is where Riot’s League of Legends and Wargaming’s World of Tanks are killing it in free-to-play. Both of those games are intensely hardcore experiences that completely contrast the cutesy, 2D side-scrolling MMO that is Maple Story. Splash Damage itself is best known for a string of hardcore multiplayer shooters, namely Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, which helped make a name for the studio, and the 2011 console-PC shooter Brink.

Nexon has had success with shooters Sudden Attack and Combat Arms. Kim thinks the players voicing their disgruntlement about how it’s publishing Extraction are the kind of people who overlook its entries as very ‘Asian’ in their treatment of the genre.

“I think there’s also this stigma of Asian free-to-play games being pay to win,” Kim said. “Whether they’ve played our games or other Asian games or not, that’s just a stigma that’s out there, so that’s another concern players have. The way I look at it is, rather than think about all the games that are out there, really thinking about what this partnership means, and when you say Nexon and Splash Damage are working on this game, this game is purely focused on North America and Europe. That’s basically how it’s been designed.”

He added: “When you look at Asian games, regardless of what their payment models is, or what their monetization scheme is, or how they design the game, that’s being designed for multiple markets — you have the Chinese market, the Korean market, the North American market. And you have the development team that needs to meet the needs of all of those markets. They can’t actually tailor the experience exactly towards any particular market, and it’s always going to lean towards the market where it originated.”

Those who seem unhappy about Nexon’s role in Extraction also seem to be overlooking the fact that both of its shooters have managed to maintain loyal players in the face of an increasingly competitive and challenging free-to-play market. Nexon’s Sudden Attack is among the longest running free shooters, first released back in 2004. Combat Arms came out in 2008, and by all accounts it is outperforming a string of high-profile entries that hit the category since. While big name shooters like Blacklight Retribution, Firefall and Tribes Ascend have tried to storm the market, they’ve experienced mixed fortunes. Combat Arms’ web site says it has 10 million registered players worldwide. By comparison, Blacklight Retribution and Tribes Ascend last announced about a million players each. Tribes developer Hi-Rez Studios recently said the financial performance of its shooter is “break even at best” since it released about a year and a half ago.

Still, fits and starts for the category aside, Nexon sees future growth in free-to-play coming from products developed by Western game makers for Western game players. In August, the company invested in California-based Rumble Entertainment, creator of the popular free-to-play game King’s Road.  Kim says Extraction is another stepping stone in the same strategy.

“I’ve talked about it publicly since we’ve come out here – that for every market that Nexon self-developed, it has been Korean developed games because that’s where most of our development has been, and because we were pioneers of free-to-play,” he said. “It’s been those early entries that have proven what free-to-play can do, but we’ve always felt domestic development allows developers to basically focus on what the player needs are for that specific market and optimize for over there. You see the guys at Riot, you see the Valve guys, and they’re basically creating services that Western gamers are looking for.”

“With Splash Damage I finally found a developer that sees eye to eye with me, has the same community vision, and it’s just basically creating a really awesome quality game that we believe in. I’ve basically been looking for this since 2005, so I’m pretty stoked.”

Extraction is looking to set itself apart with its character-classes and squad-based multiplayer formula, leveraging the pedigree Splash Damage is known for. Kim thinks that puts the game in contrast with other shooters out there.

“If you put your hands on the game, it’s a lot different than what’s out there in the market right now. I think that’s really important that it feels unique. Team-based multiplayer games have been out for a while but the market’s been really moving towards kill-streak based, highly lethal type shooters. The refreshing thing about [this] game is that once you put your hands on it, you realize it’s not just about that, it’s about how you coordinate with your team, and the mastery of the different roles that you have within the game.”

Nexon and Splash Damage recently announced that Extraction is ready to move out of alpha and into closed beta in October. There’s little Kim would say about what’s ahead for marketing the game, other than pleasing what the game makers call their “inner circle” of players with a quality, balanced shooter. From there, it’ll be all about happy players recruiting their friends.

“[The developers] are doing a really good job of listening to their feedback, and they’re also looking at their Echo data, which is their proprietary analytic and telemetry system to make sure that they can get a fair and balanced playing field. And then what we’re doing is adding a bunch of different roles of characters into the game to see how those play out, seeing if that’s balanced. That’s what we’re focused on right now is making a really fun game, because if we have that we’re pretty sure we can get people to come play this game.”

Kim refused to delve into even the most rudimentary discussion of how Extraction is going to monetize.

“Here’s the funny thing, when people say Splash Damage is working with Nexon, the first thing they ask is, ‘what items will you sell ‘. And I always say I don’t know.  It really depends on the DNA of that particular game and the relationship that you want to have with the consumer and the vision for that service or product. With Extraction, we actually haven’t had conversations about what we’re going to monetize, we haven’t even talked about the shop,  because the first thing you have to do is get the game down. And once the DNA of the game is set then we can talk about how to deliver more value through monetization.”

As for that post-announcement grumbling, Kim seemed to want to stress that even if the gamer community knows Nexon for only one type of game, that doesn’t define who he is and what he can bring to helping make Extraction successful.

“I’m really excited because I’ve been playing shooters for a really long time, that’s been my youth.  It’s always been multi-player shooters.  It’s funny I talked to Paul [Wedgwood] over at Splash Damage — Paul’s the CEO of Splash Damage — and he was playing the original Quake Team Fortress, and I played the shit out of that. Those are the types of games I’ve always liked playing, and basically I’m publishing a game that I think about playing every day.”