Welcome back to another roundup of MMO industry news that was mildly interesting but not enough to make anyone wanna do it as a standalone post. Just being honest!
Up first, meet the new boss, not the same as the old boss… at Netmarble. This week the Korean corporation announced that Chief Global Officer Seungwon Lee will be taking over as co-CEO of the company with an official appointment in February. Current CEO Young-sig Kwon will apparently stay on as co-CEO. “Kwon will focus primarily on Netmarble’s game business, and Lee will head the company’s overall management and global operations,” says the company, noting that the expansion of global operations is one of its core goals.
Riot Games is likewise continuing its expansion into not-entirely-League-of-Legends territory, most recently the tabletop industry. Riot Tabletop is the company’s new dedicated tabletop division, and its flag ship game will apparently be called Tellstones: King’s Gambit, “a bluffing game with perfect information for 2 or 4 players” characterized as a “Demacian variant of a game played across Runeterra.”
Finally, if you were one of the people who really wanted no challengers for Steam to ever do well, you’re going to be disappointed to learn that the Epic Games Store is doing it in spite of your weird stanning. This week, it announced it’s racked up 108 million users, and though it handed out $23 million in discounts, it also pulled in $680 million over 2019. That’s chump change to Epic Games, of course, but it was always clear that taking on Steam wasn’t an overnight endeavor. Steam, by comparison, counted a billion accounts with 90 million active users last year.
