Iceland’s CCP has been around for 21 years, and its Eve Online massively multiplayer online role-playing game is still a money spinner.

Pearl Abyss is a Seoul-based company that runs the fantasy MMORPG Black Desert Online. The studio wants to build a much bigger company with an even greater global presence in online games.

CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson said that there was a lot of synergy between CCP’s plans and Pearl Abyss and you can never have too much synergy… or fibre for that matter.

Apparently there is a match between their “cultures and backgrounds and DNA” which sounds a bit icky and unlikely, but I assume they tested both.

CCP Games do come out of it rather well, but it is an admission that VR games were not doing well. Its Eve: Valkyrie (a starfighter sim based in the Eve Online universe) didn’t work and the company scaled back.

However in Korea and China, services and online games are popular. Asia’s public markets value gaming companies quite high at multiples versus the West.

CCP Games will continue to operate independently, with 250 employees at studios in Reykjavik, London, and Shanghai, while integrating the company’s extensive development and publishing experience into Pearl Abyss’ operations for all current and future projects. The deal is expected to close October 12.