Former EA CEO Patrick Söderlund starts new studio with Korean money

Patrick Söderlund, who stepped down as chief design officer at publisher Electronic Arts in August, will start his own business. From Stockholm he starts the new Embark Studios. The studio will collaborate with the Korean Nexon, which is investing an undisclosed amount in the studio.

As the ‘sole strategic investor’, Nexon does not seem to own Embark Studios, but the cooperation between the South Korean publisher and the Swedish studio is close. Nexon will act as publisher of Embark’s games. Those will be online games. According to the press release, these are “new kinds of interactive entertainment and simulated virtual online worlds” enabled by “massive leaps in technology.”

It is unknown how much Nexon is investing in Embark and which game the new studio will deliver first. The two parties do announce that Söderlund is being nominated as a member of Nexon’s board of directors and that that appointment will be confirmed at the shareholders’ meeting in March.

In his last position at EA, Söderlund was responsible for the development of all of the publisher’s games. Before that, he headed Sweden’s Digital Illusions CE, the studio that makes most of the games in the Battlefield series.