F2P publisher Aeria opens new SF studio focused on North America

Berlin-based Aeria Games, a free-to-play game publisher known for operating games like Ragnarok Online 2 and the now-defunct F.E.A.R. Online, has gone ahead and opened a new office in San Francisco to support and expand its operations in the North American market.

This is interesting because Aeria was once a California-based game company chiefly focused on MMO games, before expanding in 2012 by acquiring online game portal Ijji Games (and its roughly ~10M players) from the Korean NHN Corporation. 

Later that year it merged with Japanese F2P game company Gamepot as it sought to expand and become an operator of F2P games on a global scale. By 2014 it had been acquired by German media corporation ProSiebenSat1, at which point Aeria's headquarters were relocated to Germany.

Now the company has come back to California with a new branch, led by former WildTangent and Grow Mobile exec Brett Orlanski, that is primarily tasked with marketing and user acquisition for the company's slate of published F2P games.