Nexon said that it has purchased a stake in NCsoft Corporation. Nexon today acquired 3,218,091 shares of NCsoft in a private transaction from Chairman, CEO, and Founder Taek Jin Kim at a price per share of KRW 250,000 in cash, for a total acquisition cost of KRW 804,522,750,000 or $685 million.

Leading market research firm Pearl Research will be attending the E3 Expo in Los Angeles, June 4th to June 6th.  While E3 is primarily a show for consoles, we'll also examine other platforms. Besides the console market, we'll be covering topics such as online, mobile and free-to-play games.  

Pearl Research and its sister site Redline is reporting that registration for the LOGIN conference is open at http://login2012.eventbrite.com/. There is a discount for early bird registerations. The LOGIN conference has a new venue this year at the Bently Reserve in San Francisco and will occur September 26 and 27.

Giant is developing six new webgames and will release them in the second half of 2012. Xuefeng Ji, who is the vice president of Giant, said that these six webgames may either operate by itself or operate together with other operators.

Venture capital equity financing of Chinese companies fell to its lowest level in more than five years in the first quarter of 2012, according to Dow Jones VentureSource, which tracks venture-backed companies. During the quarter, 45 deals raised US$745 million, a 39% decline in deals and a 56% decline in capital invested compared to the first quarter of 2011. This marks the lowest quarterly volume since the first quarter of 2006.

SanGuo (Three Kingdoms) is a popular material for webgames. Almost every game platform has its own profitable game about SanGuo. RenRen Game officially released the mobile game “JueZhanSanGuo” iOS version in Appstore on May 3.

GREE, announced the acquisition of Funzio, Inc., which is known for developing mid-core mobile game titles. Funzio - creator of successful titles “Crime City,” “Modern War,” and “Kingdom Age” - said it has more than 20 million game downloads.

According to published reports, the revenues of Dream Group’s social networking game is more than 10 million Yuan ($1.5 million) per month. Dream Group also plans to invest 30 million Yuan ($4.6 million) into mobile game industry.

On April 24th, Shanda (SNDA) officially released the agent mobile game “My Country”. SNDA plans to release several mobile games, which includes MMO games transplants and licensed games. The company said it is building an platform for mobile games and has recruited some people to develop mobile games.

Chinese gamer website 17173.com released findings from a 500,000 person survey questionnaire. In 2011, 66.5% of China’s players thought that game character and skill was the first criterion they used to choose games.