Published on February 1st, 2013 | by cinderboy
19gPotato – North America and Europe portals sold to rival
Announced just hours ago, North America and Europe MMO portal, gPotato, has been sold. The deal includes its parent company, Gala-Net, and its offices in the 2 locations. Gala-Net’s operations in Korea and Japan seems to remain intact as they were not mentioned. The buyer is none other than Webzen, which is expanding once again in 2013 after reviving a few years back
The deal, worth around 17.5 million USD according to Reuters, will give Webzen 100% control of Gala-Net and gPotato’s operations in North America and Europe. Webzen has already made its presence known on gPotato, with Continent of the Ninth Seal being published on the portal.
Update 1: As pointed out by Guzmán Díaz in the comments, the North America and Europe subsidiaries for Gala-Net have shrunk their revenues by over 40% year on year and have been registering losses during the first 9 months of 2012. The 17.5 million USD is hence an acceptable one, although the amount may look low from the outside.
Update 2: According to Japanese sources, Gala-Net Brazil is included in the deal as well.
Tags: Gala-Net, gPotato, Webzen
About the Author
cinderboy Your average online gamer who is bilingual in Chinese and English, although he does try to play Japanese and Korean games sometimes. Might be a hypocrite or has a short fuse, but like every gamer, he is just human and is soft on the inside. Really.
19 Responses to gPotato – North America and Europe portals sold to rival
Lets hope that this goes for the better.
The actual value of the deal is KRW 19,115,697,625 which translates to around 17,500,000 USD.
I doubt Reuters is wrong, but it seems a rather low valuation… Let’s hope for the best!
Source: www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/069080.KQ/key-developments/article/2685209
I was skeptical at the USD 17.5mil deal as well, hence I opted to bump it up to USD 175mil just in case the Korean reports got it wrong. If Reuters is reporting that, I think I should go with it.
It all makes sense if you take a look at Gala Inc.’s latest financial report: www.gala.jp/pdf/es20120810.pdf
European and North American subsidiaries have shrunk their revenues by over 40% year on year and have been registering losses during the first 9 months of 2012.
Ouch O_O
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Recently, Rappelz and FlyFF were closed in Latin America. The GM-Producer that was taking charge of the operations (he was left alone after other employees lay off), explained that Gala-net was going to continue publishing FlyFF in LatAm.
But there was clearly a lack of commitment and inversion from Gpotato to improve the service quality during 2012. In result, players saw lots of bugs and bots.
Now, these news doesn’t seem unexpected.
Thank you for the insight.
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Based on their financial we can also assume most of the other subsidiaries are in red ink and based on the Japanese version they really needed the cash.
Their iOS game developed by someone else didn’t work well and they actually let people go in Japan saying they can’t pay them anymore (foreigners are the ones they let go, less impact on their brand image in Japan).
For US and EU it might be a good move if Webzen put efforts and money in it while for Gala Group I don’t see any future with the current strategy. They have a huge studio in Korea that didn’t produce any hit in years with out-date technology, their market-share in Japan is 0 as well as on the mobile market. For your information they already sold a profitable Japanese subsidiary a year ago.
wait wut?
The financial report of GP provided by Guzman stats that as future effort Dragona online (develloped by LivePlex, also published by it then closed) is gonna have an english CBT during the 2nd quarter of 2013.
Thats quite some surprising news. Is Dragona gonna succed wherein it failed not that long ago?
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Interesting news, that why I visit MMOCulture everyday…
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What does it mean for Age of Wulin?
Well, games on gPotato were dying one after another. Luna, Iris and Prius. And I’m sure Sevencore will die soon too. Rappelz is a mistery. It’s old, but it’s still alive after years. And it’s not that good. I just hope they still can bring Eternal Blade to light.
Funny thing is Gpotato screwed up 2012 itself, people got hacked each day (Gm’s sold flyff’s American Database) and allot people got no help ore had to wait 8 months + to get their stuff back and people still are waiting to get stuff back…. and now like 2 months ago all Gm’s left Flyff america and europe took over after that no more maintenance no events and no help again even WebZen is silence, so wow so good WebZen took over and leaves the playerbases in the Dark, good job WebZen yor compagny is worse than Gpotato, iff you would fix the tickets allot off people will start playing again, Flyff is an Unique game you not wonder why it still has a playerbase who still care for the game just do something.