[Inews 24 Reporter Moon Young-soo] NHN is focusing its game business capabilities on its headquarters. It is noteworthy whether NHN, famous for its game portal ‘Hangame’, will be able to rebuild its game name once again.
According to the game industry on the 14th, NHN (CEO Jung Woo-jin) announced on the same day that it would merge with NHN Bigfoot, a game subsidiary. The purpose is to intensively nurture the group’s original game business capabilities at the headquarters. The merger ratio is 1:0.0000000, and the merger date is October 1st. NHN, the merged corporation, will remain as a surviving company, and NHN Bigfoot, the merged corporation, will disappear.
The company explained in a public notice, As part of the improvement of the structure of the group companies, NHN intends to absorb and merge NHN Bigfoot to concentrate its business capabilities and create business synergies with the parent company as the main axis.
Previously, NHN merged its game subsidiaries, which were divided into NHN Bigfoot, NHN Pixelcube, and NHN RPG, into NHN Bigfoot in February of this year. At the time, it was intended to service web board games and new games with its subsidiary NHN Bigfoot as its mainstay.
NHN explained that the change in the strategy of the headquarters to lead the game business again after five months was due to changes in the internal and external environment surrounding the game business. The recent trend toward rationalization of regulations on the game industry has ensured business operation stability, and as new businesses within the group have entered the stage of stable growth, conditions have been established to focus on their main business, the game business.
In particular, the large-scale brand marketing that has been underway since May and the deregulation of the web board game regulations applied on July 1 are visible, with the mobile web board game ‘Hangame Poker’ ranked 10th in the Google Play sales ranking on the 9th for the first time in over a year. analysis that there is.
At the same time, he emphasized that it was necessary to consolidate the business capabilities that had been dispersed in the parent company and subsidiaries in one place in order to demonstrate NHN’s rich game asset management know-how amid the changes in the trend of the game industry centered on blockchain.
NHN plans to grow into a global game company based on various genres in the future based on its competitiveness in Korea’s No. 1 web board game field. In particular, it is a strategy to preoccupy the blockchain game market in the future with unique know-how that can maximize fun while maintaining a healthy economic ecosystem, along with in-game asset management capabilities accumulated over 20 years since the launch of Hangame in 1999.
From the second half of this year, NHN plans to release several P&E game lineups such as ‘Darkest Days’ and ‘Woofaru Odyssey’, sports match prediction, social casino, RPG, and SNG sequentially from the second half of this year. In this process, various synergies are also created between games and other business divisions based on the headquarters, such as actively cooperating with NHN Cloud, which operates artificial intelligence (AI) business, and NHN Payco, which operates payment and point businesses.
Even in the early 2010s, NHN focused on the game business by introducing blockbuster titles such as ‘Terra’, but suffered ups and downs due to successive box office slump. Recently, it has shown a tendency to rely on web board games and Japanese mobile game businesses. Game sales in the first quarter of this year stood at 18.7 billion won, a level that has not fluctuated significantly for several years.
As such, NHN, which has been somewhat passive in the game business, foretells the strengthening of its headquarters-level business, and whether tangible changes will occur. For this, it is urgent to discover new box office hits, and the company is observing that it is putting weight on the P&E game lineup, starting with Darkest Days, which is scheduled to be launched in the second half of the year. In particular, Darkest Days is a new route shooter genre set in the zombie apocalypse world, with a goal of soft launch within this year.
Woojin Jung, CEO of NHN, said, In order to seize new growth opportunities in the rapidly changing game industry, we want to focus our business capabilities on the headquarters and respond more actively. We will grow into a global top-tier tech company by leading the shared growth of our subsidiaries’ new businesses, such as commerce and commerce.
Meanwhile, starting with this merger, NHN will also promote efficiency in the structure of group companies based on a business strategy of choice and concentration. Focusing on the four core businesses of ▲content, ▲technology, ▲payment, and ▲commerce, the current 82 consolidated corporations will be reorganized into 60 by 2024 to maximize management efficiency.