According to social media posts from developers affected, a number of staff within Nexon America are being laid off as at least two of the company’s California-based offices are closed down.
So far, it looks as if both Nexon M and Nexon’s Division Partners Office are being closed. A post on LinkedIn from one of the people affected notes that some Division Partners Office staff have been relocated to other positions, but it seems that several developers at both offices are now left without work.
Production manager Chris Jung shared a post on LinkedIn calling attention to the closure of the Division Partners Office today, a post that also shares the LinkedIn profiles of some of the developers affected in an effort to help those that had been working at the office land new jobs following the closure.
Nexon’s Division Partners Office provided live operations, QA, community management, marketing, production, and publishing support for three games in the West: Mabinogi, Rocket Arena, and one unannounced title.
According to a previous post from senior recruiter Richard Diaz-Villanueva on LinkedIn, Nexon M, Nexon America’s Emeryville, California-based publishing office, is also due to close down this month, leaving a number of developers with experience in product management, marketing, customer service, QA, finance, and more without employment.
We’ve reached out to Nexon for comment and details on the extent of the closures, layoffs and other effects of the Nexon America restructuring, and will update this story following a reply. If you or someone you know has been affected by these layoffs, you can email Gamasutra to share your story confidentially.
Update: When reached for comment, Nexon did not elaborate on the scale of the layoffs or detail the studios affected by the matter, instead saying that the company is “consolidating its mobile and PC/Console publishing business into one publishing unit to better support both mobile and PC/console live games, and to also position ourselves for the recent trend of platform convergence.”
“Nexon has one of the most powerful live games capabilities in the industry, and streamlining its Western operation by consolidating mobile and PC/Console will allow us to leverage the capability of both organizations to create an even stronger presence for Nexon in the west,” concludes the statement.