Quote:Eve Online maker CCP Games, Iceland’s biggest game studio, has agreed to be acquired by Black Desert Online creator Pearl Abyss of South Korea for $425 million.

That’s a huge sum, but CCP has been around for 21 years, and its Eve Online massively multiplayer online role-playing game continues to enthrall hundreds of thousands of fans, who buy virtual goods in the game and periodically destroy them in spectacular space battles.

So who wouldn’t want to buy this company? It certainly proved alluring for Pearl Abyss. The Seoul-based company that operates the fantasy MMORPG Black Desert Online, which features massive castle sieges and has 9.5 million players. So now the studio are hoping to build a much bigger company with an even greater global presence in online games.

“We saw a lot of synergy between our plans and their plans and between our cultures and backgrounds and DNA. It might not be obvious of the synergy between an Iceland private company and a Korean public company, but through our games we found we had a lot in common,” said CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson in an interview with GamesBeat. “We came to the conclusion this would be a good time to make the change.”