Nexon, the South-Korean publisher of LawBreakers for both PC and PS4, has chimed in on the future of the console business, and has confirmed that it will be releasing more online console games in 2018 and the years ahead.
During the company's most recent financial earnings call with investors, president and CEO Owen Mahoney, answered a question about the Nexon's position in the console business in the years ahead following the ‘termination’ of Cliff Bleszinski’s LawBreakers earlier this year.
“Over the longer term, five years and more ultimately we see probably a consolidation or an integration between all the different platforms, the three major platforms that would be mobile, PC and console”, Nexon’s CEO answered.
“I also think that the console companies are thinking differently about their business than they were even a few years ago. And in fact Nintendo was the leader when you look at the switch about the idea of bringing something that used to exist in a living room and bring that portably with you around. So my guess, I don’t have any particular insight, but I think that Sony and Microsoft are thinking about the console business is in a different way than they did even a couple of years ago. A couple of years ago they would talk about owning the living room, but as we all know there really isn’t a living room anymore.”
Mahoney then continued by stating that he believes that there’s plenty of opportunity for online consoles games in the years ahead.
“Getting back to your question on console, I think in the meantime though in the more immediate term in the next few years, the console represents a huge opportunity particularly for online games”, he said.
“Console games used to be primarily single player or group player games and more and more there’s an opportunity in the living room and so we see that as an opportunity which is why we are going be bringing more games to console coming up in 2018 and beyond.
By the way one of the thing on that is, we don’t the exact timing and we’re going to watch it closely. We are not in the business of forecasting far out in the future. If we were, we’d probably be like everybody else who forecast, because I think it’s very hard business to be in, but we are watching it very closely and in the near term we think there’s a big opportunity in console.”
Back in January of this year, Nexon announced that LawBreakers would be written off due to disappointing sales and player numbers. The publisher blamed the insane success of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds for the game’s failure.
