Nexon is one of Korea's biggest game companies, giving us games like MapleStory. Sadly, they are currently under fire, as Nexon was just fined almost $9M over the Cubes drop rate in MapleStory.

The news comes courtesy of the Korean Economic Daily (KED), which talks about various topics involving South Korea's, well, economy. In this particular article, they brought up that the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) had fined Nexon 11.6 Billion Won (or roughly $8.9 million). The anti-trust commission said that Nexon had manipulated the drop rates of Cubes, an item MapleStory players can buy with real-life money, in a way that was disadvantageous to players. That is, they made it so that the player's preferred cubes had a lower probability of being drawn. Not only that, but they also reduced the probability of some cubes to zero, making it impossible to get.

According to KED, Nexon started changing the drop rates of the cubes as early as August 2011, continuing until March 2021. While this is bad in and of itself, it's worsened by the fact that players were not even informed of the probability change. In fact, according to the KFTC, Nexon even issued a notice in August 2011 that there were no changes to the Cube structure.

The $8.9M fine that the KFTC placed on Nexon is the largest fine they could impose on the company. Kim Jung-ki, director of the market surveillance department of the KFTC, said that they did this because “the Cube is a core product of the game (MapleStory), the period of the violation is long, and this is the second violation (by Nexon) following Sudden Attack.” For those not familiar, Nexon also had to pay a 939M Won (roughly $850,000) fine back in 2018 for falsifying information about Sudden Attack's lottery system.

Nexon, in response, accepted the fine from the KFTC. However, they also said that they will consider challenging said fine, or even bring it to court. Should there be updates in this case, we will be sure to let you know.

That's all the information we have about how Nexon was fined over the Cubes drop rate in MapleStory. Check out our gaming news articles for the latest in gaming news.