Korean giant NC has spent $300m on four studios and isn’t stopping there

NC’s Anel Ceman says the Korean giant is looking to buy established mobile studios making $50-100m per year across all genres and business models.

Ceman is the firm’s head of social mobile and had worked in senior roles at Outfit7, Wildlife and Tripledot before taking up a leadership role at the Korean giant.

He’s been busy. In the last year the MMO specialist formerly known as NCsoft has spent over $300m acquiring four mobile game companies – Vietnam’s Lihuhu, Korea-based Springcomes, Moving Eye in Slovenia and Germany’s JustPlay, a rewarded gaming platform founded by several former AppLovin execs.

Across those four studios, NC now runs around 200 live mobile games in total, and it is pulling in all the data from those titles to build a central internal toolset that can manage creative production, live ops, A/B testing, prediction models and more across its portfolio.

“We will keep buying actively,” says Ceman, who notes that the Korean firm is looking to buy up developers working “where the best games are made,” including markets like Japan, China, India and Turkiye.

“We are trying to build or acquire hubs in these strategic regions,” he continues. “We have Europe, Korea and Vietnam already covered.”

Having spent over $200m on JustPlay in March, NC’s next deal may be even bigger, says Ceman. NC is looking for mobile studios with successful live titles pulling in $50-100m a year.

“We look at studios that are profitable, that already have some size, then we can then help them out with scaling,” he says.

“For studios that we acquire, we do not operate them so they are quite independent. Think of it as an operator partner, we provide either financing capital or expertise from me and my team or technology or strategic things that NC built, either AI or live ops or technology infrastructure.”

Ceman is clear that NC is not looking to be an early-stage investor or take punts on new or unproven studios. He is only on the lookout for high potential live games, be they ad-monetised, IAP-based or a mix of both.

“We are building an ecosystem, and to build the whole ecosystem, you need to have the full monetisation spectrum,” he adds.

“That means we have all the data, but then also what works in specific genres or specific categories…so then, if something works for one studio, it can be easily replicated or translated across the whole portfolio. Not everything, but quite a lot of things, can be done in that way.”

NC has said publicly that it intends to build its mobile casual division into a $5bn business by 2030, representing about a third of its total revenue.

“If we look at the last quarter, mobile casual earnings were already 22 percent of total NC revenue,” adds Ceman. “So we are becoming an important pillar in the company.”