Nexon Doubles Down

In August 2021, Nexon Games unveiled its yet most ambitious game-in-development the ‘Project Magnum’ with a PS5 trailer that instantly wowed 1.9 million viewers. It was Nexon’s first attempt at the looter shooter genre after dominating most of the MMORPG scenes in its native territory: Korea. Nexon Games’ adventurism was met with much fanfare by the Korean media and the future success both domestically and globally seemed almost guaranteed.

According to the industry estimate, the development cycle ran at least 3 years to 5 years in total, burning through the cash piles profited from mobile and online game sales of other popular IPs such as Sudden Attack, V4, Blue Archive and HIT2. It was to create the future of Nexon Games, moving away from its long-running success and experience from often aggressively monetised MMORPG games.

In July 2022, Nexon Games officially announced the new AAA game title ‘The First Descendant’ from ‘Project Magnum’ as the CBT (”Closed Beta Test”) schedule was also announced to start from September 2022.

With its official launch in the second day of July 2024, the new blockbuster title tops the global sales ranking on Steam with 220,000 concurrent users.

Nexon Games has now lost 95.28% of users since launch per Steam and the future for the looter shooter title 'The First Descendant’ and its dev team looks bleak.

Internally, ‘The First Descendant’ dev team has barely any justification to survive the incoming storm. An indie game called the ‘Dave The Diver’ by MINTROCKET with 26+ bare staff had recently surpassed the colossal investment project ‘The First Descendant’ and its entire team in terms of concurrent peak player numbers on Steam for Q2’25. It is becoming increasingly difficult to justify continuing investment into the failing title as the ‘Dave The Diver’ is glaring at the team with better efficiency and performance.

It may also be impossible for Nexon Games to write-off the IP investment as permanent losses on the book at this late stage. Implicitly, the title was to perform, almost guaranteed, and bring-in much needed sales revenue and fresh cash into the company. The investor expectation was high from the Middle East to Japan, all eyeing on the guaranteed financial success of the new looter shooter title. There are signs of desperation and persistence from the management of Nexon Games.

And just-in-time for the uncertainty surrounding Nexon, the firm has recently been reported to be in talks for possible sales of the holding company NXC altogether for 15 billion dollars to Tencent per Bloomberg. Note that Nexon is entertaining the idea with ample uncertainties for the company.

According to our proprietary Talent Intelligence data & analysis models, the special hiring effort for ‘The First Descendant’ continues for team Magnum Studio, the internal development studio responsible for the title within Nexon Games. However, the company-wide special hiring for the project is hitting the roadblock as Magnum Studio primarily seeks highly sought-after specialist skills for Motion Capture, PvE looter shooter & cross platform experience, Behavioural Tree and Unreal Engine 5. Most needed jobs and skills are densely concentrated around ‘Art’ (50%) & ‘Business Development’ (41%) functions of all job categories.

Netmarble’s ‘Project Evilbane (previously dev-titled FENRIR) ‘, NCSOFT’s ‘Project Open World Shooter’, ‘Next-gen FPS’ & ‘AION2’ are all competing for the same talents in the highly competitive and saturated Korean gaming market, making it increasingly difficult for team Magnum Studio to have a chance at hiring senior top talents. We look at the strategic thinking behind the hiring pattern of the project. Given that Nexon’s rival NCSOFT is also going through hiring challenges for key positions of game development, the talent attraction difficulty & HR outage for Nexon is to be continued and to an extent weigh down negatively on Nexon’s returns.

To make this happen, Nexon Games curated a special recruiting site dedicated for ‘The First Descendant’ project on its ‘Careers’ page on the most prominent section of the site.

Nexon Games ‘Careers’ screenshot translated in English as of 10 June 2025

On 7 June 2025, Nexon Games’s officially announced the continuation of its third update Season 3 “Breakthrough” as anticipated by our earlier announcement the day before.

For Nexon Games, there’s a lot to unpack. From the strategic management perspective, an indie studio of no previous significance performed far more efficient and better internally and the colossal investment project with long development cycle is likely to be written-off based on predicted user metrics, as it further faces Pearl Abyss’s purpose-built game engine 'Black Space’ and its major AAA project 'Crimson Desert’ in Q4’25 for both domestic and international markets.

Currently, Nexon Games has some unannounced games in the development pipeline as below after cancelling two major projects ‘Kingdom of the Winds 2’ & 'Gensei Suikoden Online’ for unannounced business reasons with Supercat.

Stay tuned for our next newsletter as we unveil more competitive intelligence for the Korean gaming sector.

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