logo
South Korean game company Krafton to acquire Japan's ADK for $516 mln

South Korean game company Krafton to acquire Japan's ADK for $516 mln

Reuters3 days ago

SEOUL, June 24 (Reuters) - South Korean game company Krafton Inc (259960.KS), opens new tab said on Tuesday it had agreed to buy Japan's advertising and animation group ADK for 75 billion yen ($516.21 million).
Krafton, the developer and publisher of the blockbuster game "PUBG: Battlegrounds", said in a statement it would acquire ADK Holdings' parent company from Bain Capital Japan.
ADK, one of Japan's top three comprehensive advertising groups, has participated in the production of more than 300 animations, Krafton said.
It has participated in animation production for IPs including Doraemon, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Crayon Shin-chan, according to the website of an ADK affiliate.
"By combining ADK's animation planning and production capabilities with Krafton's global game development and service experience, we plan to jointly create new added values that have not been tried before while maintaining the identity of both companies," Krafton said.
($1 = 145.2900 yen)

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Cristiano Ronaldo's Al-Nassr ‘plot £85million move for Liverpool's Luis Diaz' after handing Man Utd legend new deal
Cristiano Ronaldo's Al-Nassr ‘plot £85million move for Liverpool's Luis Diaz' after handing Man Utd legend new deal

The Sun

time3 hours ago

  • The Sun

Cristiano Ronaldo's Al-Nassr ‘plot £85million move for Liverpool's Luis Diaz' after handing Man Utd legend new deal

Cristiano Ronaldo's Al-Nassr are prepared to pay Liverpool £85million for Luis Diaz, reports claim. The Saudi Pro League side are in hunt for fresh talent after handing Ronaldo the most lucrative contract in sporting history. 5 5 With two years remaining on his Anfield contract, Diaz opened the door to a surprise exit after confessing he was in talks with other clubs. The 28-year-old winger played a key role in Liverpool's title-winning season, contributing 17 goals and eight assists in 50 appearances across all competitions. Liverpool haven't offered Diaz a contract extension and he could be marginalised after the £116million arrival of club-record signing Florian Wirtz from Bayer Leverkusen. According to a report by Okaz, Al-Nassr have set their sights on Diaz and are open to offering a staggering £85million. Journalist Ben Jacobs confirmed Al-Nassr's interest and hinted that while Liverpool currently have no intention of selling, such a huge bid could tempt the club's hierarchy to reconsider. The report did add that "the final decision is left to the player himself", with the Colombia international also strongly linked with cash-strapped Barcelona. Al-Nassr are planning a mega recruitment drive after missing out on Asian Champions League football next season and failing to win a title since Ronaldo, 40, joined from Manchester United in 2021. SunSport previously reported that Liverpool valued Diaz at £70million, so the club might be drawn in by banking £15million more. 5 CASINO SPECIAL - BEST CASINO BONUSES FROM £10 DEPOSITS But SPORT have claimed that Barca are "convinced" that they will finally land Diaz when the second-half of the summer window opens after the Club World Cup. His girlfriend, Gera Ponce, posted an emotional Instagram message which some fans believed was a farewell. Man Utd open to Rasmus Hojlund offers LATEST with Italian giants keen | Transfers Exposed She wrote under a slideshow of photos showcasing Diaz's triumphs in the 2024-25 season: "From the first day we arrived, we felt first hand what it means to be a part of this club. "We knew the slogan was 'You'll Never Walk Alone', but to hear them sing it with so much passion, support us every moment and show such unconditional love... confirmed to us that here you never walk alone. "This fanbase doesn't just support, it feels. And what you have made my boyfriend and our entire family feel is something we carry in our souls." But Liverpool boss Arne Slot is eager to keep Diaz for next season's title defence after his ever-growing £216MILLION reboot, with Jeremie Frimpong and Milos Kerkez joining over the last month.

Japan launches a climate change monitoring satellite on mainstay H2A rocket's last flight
Japan launches a climate change monitoring satellite on mainstay H2A rocket's last flight

The Independent

time4 hours ago

  • The Independent

Japan launches a climate change monitoring satellite on mainstay H2A rocket's last flight

Japan on Sunday launched a satellite to monitor greenhouse gas emissions using its mainstay H-2A rocket, which made its final flight before it is replaced by a new flagship designed to be more cost competitive in the global space market. The H-2A rocket successfully lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center in southwestern Japan, carrying the GOSAT-GW satellite as part of Tokyo's effort to mitigate climate change. The satellite was released into orbit about 16 minutes later. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which operates the rocket launch, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, will hold a news conference later Sunday to give further details of the flight. Sunday's launch marked the 50th and final flight for the H-2A, which has served as Japan's mainstay rocket to carry satellites and probes into space with a near-perfect record since its 2001 debut. After its retirement, it will be fully replaced by the H3, which is already in operation, as Japan's new main flagship. The launch follows several days of delays because of malfunctioning of the rocket's electrical systems. The GOSAT-GW, or Global Observing SATellite for Greenhouse gases and Water cycle, is a third series in the mission to monitor carbon, methane and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. It will start distributing data in about one year, officials said. The liquid-fuel H-2A rocket with two solid-fuel sub-rockets developed by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has so far had 49 flights with a 98% success record, with only one failure in 2003. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has provided its launch operation since 2007. H-2A successfully carried into space Japan's moon lander SLIM last year, and a popular Hayabusa2 spacecraft in 2014 to reach a distant asteroid, contributing to the country's space programs. Japan sees a stable, commercially competitive space transport capability as key to its space program and national security, and has been developing two new flagship rockets as successors of the H-2A series — the larger H3 with Mitsubishi, and a much smaller Epsilon system with the aerospace unit of the heavy machinery maker IHI. It hopes to cater to diverse customer needs and improve its position in the growing satellite launch market. The H3, is designed to carry larger payloads than the H-2A at about half its launch cost to be globally competitive, though officials say more cost reduction efforts are needed to achieve better price competitiveness in the global market. The H3 has made four consecutive successful flights after a failed debut attempt in 2023, when the rocket had to be destroyed with its payload.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach review – a hypnotising arthouse game with an A-list cast
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach review – a hypnotising arthouse game with an A-list cast

The Guardian

time6 hours ago

  • The Guardian

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach review – a hypnotising arthouse game with an A-list cast

What is Death Stranding 2 trying to say? It's a question you will ask yourself on many occasions during the second instalment of Hideo Kojima's hypnotising, mystifying, and provocatively slow-paced cargo management simulator series. First, because during the many long and uneventful treks across its supernatural vision of Mexico and Australia, you have all the headspace in the world to ponder its small details and decipher the perplexing things you just witnessed. And second, because the question so often reveals something profound. That it can stand up to such extended contemplation is a marker of the fine craftsmanship that went into this game. Nobody is scribbling down notes to uncover what Doom: The Dark Ages is getting at or poring over Marvel Rivals' cutscenes for clues, fantastic as those games are. It is rare for any game to invite this kind of scrutiny, let alone hold up to it. But Death Stranding 2 has the atmosphere and narrative delivery of arthouse cinema. It's light of touch in its storytelling but exhaustive in its gameplay systems, and the tension between the two makes it so compelling. At first you brave one for the other; then, over time, you savour both. For anyone who missed the first Death Stranding, yes, this really is the second in a series of games about moving cargo between waypoints, on foot or by vehicle; delivering packages of food, tech and luxury items, like a post-apocalyptic Amazon driver. A mysterious event fundamentally changed the world at the start of the first game, allowing the dead to return to the realm of the living as spectral entities known as Beached Things (BTs). When a BT kills a human, it creates a disastrous event called a 'voidout', a kind of supernatural nuclear bomb explosion that leaves behind nothing but a vast crater. With humanity fragmented and sequestered in underground bunkers, protagonist Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus) was entrusted with connecting the remaining pockets of civilisation in the US to a global tech infrastructure called 'the chiral network', restoring hope for a better tomorrow. He managed it, too, making it across the entire continent with a sort of supernatural infant, Lou, carried in an artificial womb. As this sequel begins he is enjoying a secluded life in Mexico with Lou, now a toddler. And believe me, those are the scantest cliff notes possible. Death Stranding 2 begins with six solid minutes of cutscenes that attempt to convey the strange world of sci-fi and poetic metaphors that Kojima has constructed, and even that feels like a cursory summary. Decrypting the mysteries is half the fun here (the other half being the box-shifting) but even if you don't engage that deeply with the world, it follows its own kind of dreamlike logic and starts to make intuitive sense. It is not clear whether Death Stranding 2's Australian once looked like the one we know, for example, or whether it was always a patchwork of Icelandic tundra, snowcapped mountains and multicoloured desert. What matters is that it feels consistent. Meditative it may be, but this isn't a game about watching Sam enjoy retirement and fatherhood for 50 hours. He is inevitably called back into action, this time reconnecting the Mexican and Australian populations to the chiral network for an outfit called Drawbridge, a logistics company funded by an unknown benefactor and headed by returning character Fragile (Léa Seydoux). If that sounds a bit dry, what if I told you that Fragile wears a pair of long Greta Garbo gloves around her neck, which she can move like a second set of hands? A swashbuckling gang of assists Sam on his mission, following him around on the DHV Magellan, a ship with more A-listers on board than a Cannes red carpet. Seydoux, George Miller, Guillermo del Toro, Nicolas Winding Refn, Elle Fanning and Shioli Kutsuna all give brilliant performances, as does veteran game actor Troy Baker as chief baddie Higgs. The major characters exist primarily as poetic devices and morbid metaphors: Rainy (Kutsuna) is an ostracised optimist who makes it rain whenever she goes outside; Tarman (Miller) lost a hand to supernatural tar, and can now use it to guide the ship through its currents; Heartman (Darren Jacobs) dies and is reborn every few minutes. By rights, they should all be simply too strange to invoke pathos, but there are rare moments when the allegory is dialled down and they interact in human and poignant ways. If you don't feel a lump in your throat watching Rainy and Tomorrow (Fanning) sing together, it's not just Deadman who is dead inside. Package delivery is, strangely, depicted to the highest of gameplay standards. It sounds boring, but you can't help get pulled in by the magnetic draw of these detailed systems. In the last game, combat felt like an afterthought, but there is more of it this time as missions bring you into conflict with both BTs and other humans, and it is supported by typically slick mechanics that make launching a grenade or snapping a neck feel equally gratifying. You can fabricate tools to take with you – ladders and climbing ropes for mountainous routes, assault rifles and grenades when a fight is likely. The pleasure is as much in the preparation as it is in the action; it feels good to impose some order on an otherwise chaotic and unknowable world. That's probably why we all baked so much banana bread during lockdown. Kojima had a draft for Death Stranding 2's story before the Covid-19 pandemic, but rewrote it from scratch after being locked down along with the rest of the world. You don't have to look too hard to see the influences – a population that is too scared to go outside, governments that promise to save you by putting an end to travel and physical contact, the profound loneliness of Sam's job as a porter travelling solo across barren landscapes. Fittingly, you can interact with other players, but only at a distance, sharing equipment, building structures and leaving holographic signs and likes for other players in their own games. This ends up being a biting piece of lockdown satire – as time goes by the world becomes clogged up with flickering icons, and as more structures appear you are confronted by constant 'like' symbols. It feels like the mind-numbing attention spam of social media, and there's no way this is an accident. The first game had the advantage of surprise. Death Stranding 2 does not. Much of what is good – and what is tedious – about this game was also true of the last, but at the same time it has refined each bizarre element. Combat feels punchier, the world map more hand-crafted, missions more varied. Asking you to do all of that schlepping about all over again in a whole new game should feel like a practical joke, but it is so mechanically rich and loaded with meaning, you just nod and don the backpack a second time. Of the many things Death Stranding 2 is trying to say, the message that comes to the fore is: you are never truly alone. Global disasters, big tech, even death itself – these things might abstract the way we connect to one another, but they can't sever the connection altogether. Not bad for a game about delivering boxes. Death Stranding 2 is released on 26 June, £69.99/US$69.99/A$124.95

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store