Chris Ko of This Game Studio and Michael Chang of NCSoft
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NCSoft invests $5M into Vancouver game developer This Game Studio

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

South Korean online game giant NCSoft is investing $5 million in a new game studio in Vancouver, Canada, as part of an ambitious plan to move into mobile games in the West. The new studio, This Game Studio, was created by former veterans of Exploding Barrel Games and its parent company, Kabam.

NCSoft made its name as a publisher of massively multiplayer online games such as Lineage and Guild Wars. But those games, while still popular, don’t have the same kind of growth potential as mobile, which is expected to grow beyond a billion players and generate $30 billion in revenues in 2015. NCSoft has explored investments in the past, but it hasn’t been as active as other Asian companies such as Nexon or Tencent.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.