Care for a little smile to start off this first week of 2024? Then feast your eyes on a hefty $8.9M (₩11.6M) fine levied against Nexon because the company kept changing the probability of getting a specific item in MapleStory without informing players of the changes.
The fine was issued by Korea’s Fair Trade Commission for violating the country’s Act on Consumer Protection in Electronic Commerce, and it centers around items known as cubes, which have the ability to improve the tier of a piece of equipment. When cubes were first introduced in May 2010, the probability of seeing each type of cube was equal, but the KFTC alleges that Nexon stealthily lowered how frequently some of the more popular cube types would appear, first in September 2010 and then again between August 2011 and March 2021, to the point that highly desired cubes wouldn’t appear whatsoever, all while denying it had done just that.
Players were paying about $1.50 per pull in the cash shop to draw these cubes, while Nexon raked in ₩550B (or $419M) in cube sales between that time. The KFTC notes this as the highest fine ever charged by the antitrust body primarily because the cube is considered a “core product of the game” and it’s the second time Nexon attempted to screw players over with unannounced probability changes; the first time was for the studio giving out false information about lockboxes in the shooter Sudden Attack in 2018, which resulted in a $722K fine. Apparently, it needed to be told a second time.
Nexon has said in a statement that it accepts the KFTC’s decision but is considering either challenging it or taking the matter to court.
Readers might recall that in the middle of 2022, Nexon CEO Owen Mahoney suggested that MapleStory’s 2021 decline was the result of poor transparency when it came to gambleboxes – and that its rebound in 2022 was the result of Nexon addressing its transparency lapse. “In 2021, players voiced concerns about probability disclosures related to the purchase of in-game items. The entire sector was put on notice, but Nexon was uniquely aggressive in responding,” he assured investors in 2022, insisting that the company had since “expanded disclosures,” among other things. Under that banner of passive language, Mahoney didn’t clarify who, exactly, had put the entire sector on notice, but given the timeline, we might assume the KFTC was already on its case and that the company’s dramatic volte-face had less to do with player comms and more with legal obligations than he let on.
