With development costs rising, we need to make games based on user feedback, not numbers and data from the past, says NEXON Games executive  

In an interview with 4Gamer at TGS 2024, the CEO of NEXON Games Yong-hyun Park gave interesting insights into how the company makes judgements about what games to greenlight amidst rising development costs and harsh market conditions. Up until now, Park has led the development of successful titles such as NCSOFT’s Lineage II, Bluehole (now Krafton)’s TERA, and more recently, Blue Archive and The First Descendant. 

When asked about how NEXON Games assesses potential games, the process Park describes focuses more on listening to users’ feedback than analyzing market data and calculating forecasts. Part of this is due to a lack of precedent in South Korea’s video game industry. “If it’s an MMORPG, we can roughly imagine how it will perform. However, when it comes to titles like Blue Archive or The First Descendant, neither my company nor I personally have experience making and releasing such games to the market, and even in Korea, these kinds of games have hardly been made up until now.” 

Due to this lack of relevant data, NEXON Games tends to “run with projects” without having a defined forecast as to how they may perform, and Park says that this is the case even with games that cost upwards of $70 million to make. 

However, it’s not only the lack of data that contributes to this – Park doesn’t trust numbers when it comes to assessing the potential of a game. Although the company does use overseas market data as reference and sets rough estimates, they treat numbers as unreliable and relative, while the “raw voices of users” are absolute, according to the CEO. 

“Working backwards based on the profit you want to achieve with your game used to work fine in the past, when production costs were low. But with development costs gradually increasing, errors in the numbers can accumulate, and you can find your game falling apart at release. If you think about it that way, focusing on user feedback is the most reliable method at the moment.” 

He goes on to explain that, “we may not know how much money we can make by developing a certain game, but we can get a feeling as to what kind of game will make users happy. That’s why we test games even in the middle of development and collect feedback.” 

Park comments that even though this kind of user feedback cannot give the developers clear data about how many downloads, log ins or purchases they can expect, “we can find out whether users would like to play our game and come back to it, and we choose to believe in this and run with it.”