The MMO giant Nexon announces the closure of its studio in Orange County, California. Bitter: The former face of the MMORPG WildStar worked there since 2017 as Creative Director on a new PC game. It could have been a new MMORPG.
This is the studio: The studio “Nexon OC” was located in Irvine, California. The university town with 260,000 inhabitants is also home to Blizzard. The studio had the backing of Nexon, one of the major global MMO giants, from which MMORPGs like MapleStory or the PC MMO Dungeon Fighter Online, which is very successful. In recent years, however, Nexon has increasingly focused on mobile.
In the studio, “innovative online games” were to be created. However, no game was ever officially announced.
A few months ago, the studio was still looking for new people who could work from home due to Corona. According to GamesIndustry.biz, about 60 people had listed the studio as their employer.
This is why the studio is closing: Nexon states in a statement according to VentureBeat only gives a vague reason. It says:
“We sincerely thank the OC team for their dedication and output, but the projects that are being developed there no longer fit our creative competencies. All full-time employees affected by the decision will receive severance pay and assistance with outplacement.”
Statement from Nexon
Who do we know that worked at the studio? The probably most well-known employee at Nexon OC was Stephan Frost. He became known as “The Face” of the MMORPG WildStar.
Frost was a producer there and appeared in the humorous and well-produced dev videos that drew so much attention to WildStar before its release.
But in 2014, Frost left Carbine Studio and WildStar. He went to Blizzard, but he didn’t stay long there either. In 2017, he then announced that he was now Creative/Game Director at Nexon OC and was working on a new PC game that is being developed with Unreal Engine 4. However, it has not made it to a presentation in the 3 years since then.
Frost appears somewhat downcast on Twitter. He says: 2020 continues to be the worst year ever. Elsewhere, he offers to help his colleagues find new employers. He says they are talented (via mmoculture).
According to Frost, he only “just now” learned of the studio’s closure.
Maybe a new MMORPG died there
What could be behind it? One can now speculate about what Nexon was developing. If you set Frost as the lead, it could very well have been an MMORPG, an online shooter might also have been possible. Whether the work on the project will continue in some way, we do not know.
In any case, this is another setback for Nexon, which has already suffered a bloody nose in the West with Lawbreakers.
WildStar is one of the saddest stories you can tell about online RPGs in the last 7 years. The game was considered a possible WoW killer and started quite promisingly. But then the crash came:
