Nexon - Company History

In December 2002 the Korean online-game company NEXON Corporation — today NXC — set up Nexon Japan in Tokyo. It was conceived as a distributor, but in January 2003 it took over the online-game business of an existing Japanese firm and became the operator that ran Korea-made titles for Japanese players: localization, billing and customer support were handled in Japan, while the games themselves came from Seoul. That division of labour — one country makes, another serves — was fixed at birth and has shaped the company ever since.

The decisive move came in October 2005. The Korean parent carved out its PC online business into a new NEXON Corporation — today NEXON Korea — and handed every share to the Japanese subsidiary. The child had swallowed its parent’s core business: Tokyo became the group’s operating holding company and Seoul its development arm, the two-pole structure Nexon still runs on. Under it the group pulled in the titles that would define it, all built on the then-novel model of free play paid for by in-game items — MapleStory (acquired from Wizet in 2005) and, above all, Dungeon & Fighter, gained with the 2008 purchase of its studio Neople. Published in China by Tencent, Dungeon & Fighter turned a single Korean title into the engine of group profit.

Renamed simply Nexon in 2009, the company listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December 2011 — an unusual thing for a Korea-born game business to do. President Seung-woo Choi led it to market while founder Jay-Woong Kim stayed with parent NXC. In that first listed year Korea earned Nexon roughly five times what Japan did. A Tokyo-listed company whose money was made abroad, explained every quarter in Japanese disclosures: the gap between where it was domiciled and where it earned would become its defining trait.

In March 2014 the American executive Owen Mahoney became president — a handover from Seung-woo Choi, who had joined the group in 1999, to an outside professional manager, and with him the group’s strategic vocabulary changed. Mahoney would later describe a deliberate narrowing: concentrate only on deeply immersive games — easy to learn, extremely hard to master — and pass over casual and single-player, story-driven titles. Under him the portfolio took the shape it still has: a small number of long-running live-service franchises, run for years rather than replaced.

The strategy showed in the numbers, and so did its cost. Adopting IFRS, Nexon set records — then gave part of them back. Revenue and profit peaked in the year to December 2015, slipped the next year as the North American segment stayed in the red, then climbed to a new high by 2018 as the China business around Dungeon & Fighter, run by Neople, grew. The pattern — a peak, a plateau, another peak — is the flip side of concentration: when a handful of titles carry the whole group, a single franchise’s rhythm swings the results.

Even as it ran its established franchises, Nexon began buying the capacity to make new ones. In 2018 it brought development in-house by taking control of NAT Games — later NEXON Games — and in 2019 it acquired Embark Studios of Stockholm, the studio behind the later shooters The Finals and ARC Raiders. Embark was a bet on Western-market shooters, a genre Nexon had never mastered, and it meant running development on two distant footings at once — Korea for the money-makers, Sweden for the wagers.

From 2022 a second engine became capital returns. In February Nexon set a three-year share-buyback ceiling of $761.2M (¥100bn), and that April it moved up to the Tokyo exchange’s new Prime market. Revenue reached a fresh high, yet the geography did not change: the group grew larger while still leaning on China and Korea. The same cash also funded bets beyond games — a 2022 stake in the Russo brothers’ film studio AGBO, later written down by $338M (¥44bn) — a reminder that carrying its characters outside games was no surer a thing than the franchises it was meant to diversify away from.

In March 2024 Jung-hun Lee, from NEXON Korea, became president, ending Mahoney’s decade and swinging leadership back from an outside professional manager to an executive rooted in the development floor. His first task was defensive: from late 2023 both pillars had stalled at once — Dungeon & Fighter in China and MapleStory in Korea — and the group’s results move whenever either one wobbles. The new team put diagnosing that slump ahead of any new launch or long-term plan.

The answer came from both directions in a single quarter. In May 2024 Dungeon & Fighter Mobile launched in China through Tencent and drove the franchise to record levels; that July the new IP The First Descendant arrived, taking about three-quarters of its sales in Western markets and giving Nexon its first real foothold in the North America it had long struggled in. In the strongest quarter China supplied some 42% of revenue, Korea 35%, the West 13% and Japan just 4% — proof of how far one title’s launch can redraw the map, and of how concentrated that map remains.

In September 2024 Nexon set out long-term targets: by the year to December 2027, revenue of $5.0B (¥750bn) and operating profit of $1.7B (¥250bn), with Dungeon & Fighter and MapleStory deepened and roughly a fifth of the growth to come from new IP. Alongside them came rules rather than intentions — a floor on return on equity, and a pledge to pay out at least a third of the prior year’s operating profit in dividends and buybacks, with the buyback programme renewed in 2024 and again in 2025. The disclosure style — bind the profit target, the payout and the investment appetite all in numbers — carries straight over from the professional-manager years, now in the hands of a leader from the code.