Can we get a “HELL YEAH!”?
On September 19, around three days before news broke out about Kakao Entertainment’s termination of Tapas, the original founder of Wuxiaworld made a huge announcement. Ren revealed that they had bought back Wuxiaworld from Tapas Entertainment and is now “the 100% owner and operator of this company.” The statement also hinted at the closure of Tapas.
The full statement can be read below:
Ren is back – tell a friend.
Hi y’all! To keep things relatively simple, this is just a formal announcement that there has been a change in management and ownership. As of the start of last week, I (RWX, original founder of Wuxiaworld) have completed a buyback of Wuxiaworld from Tapas Entertainment and am once more the 100% owner and operator of this company. I want to thank our partners at both Tapas as well as Tapas’ parent, Kakao Entertainment, for working with me to get this completed, and at rather breakneck speeds tbh, for reasons that will become apparent in the days to come.
As you may suspect, this will have a quite a significant number of cascading effects on Wuxiaworld in the coming months. Some of you may have a lot of questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them in my habitual long-form post announcements that will be made in the upcoming weeks. For now, though – I just wanted to say how glad I am to see y’all again.
Cheers and much love, all!
What the “cascading effects” are, Ren did not divulge. The comments for the post were full of joy and relief at seeing Wuxiaworld return to its original owner.
Launched in 2014 by Jingping Lai, a former American diplomat, Wuxiaworld offered an enormous library of Chinese wuxia (martial arts) novels and acted as an entry point into the genre for those curious about it. Wuxiaworld was acquired by Kakao Entertainment in December 2021 and since then, has been making a concentrated effort into expanding their offerings for the Korean wuxia novels, although prior to the acquirement, Wuxiaworld has been translating Korean novels.
Ren posted an explanation for the acquisition (although he calls it a merger-acquisition) five years ago, saying that the platform has always been profitable but that Wuxiaworld has always had trouble with content. “For a company like ours, the ‘choke point’ has always been in content – if we can’t acquire enough good content (ie licenses), we will eventually be in big trouble.” With the speed of the market changing–increasing fees, other platforms gaining access to “exclusive” licenses, and the slowing pace of licensing novels–Wuxiaworld’s sustainability and longevity were in question.
The acquisition by Kakao Entertainment thus made sense, according to the founder. Kakao Entertainment had “guaranteed [Wuxiaworld’s] product pipeline for many years to come… a massive marketing budget for Wuxiaworld, which will further reinforce our long-term viability and health… and they were determined to keep me onboard to the point of making it a contractual requirement.”
With the departure of Wuxiaworld, Kakao Entertainment’s Tapas Entertainment–which included Tapas and Radish, both of whom had been suddenly shut down by Kakao Entertainment–has officially closed.
Source: Wuxiaworld
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