Nexon, the parent company behind Embark Studios and its massive PvPvE extraction shooter hit ARC Raiders has long been a supporter of AI and Generative AI (GenAI) entering the game development workflow. It was Nexon’s CEO, Junghun Lee, who last year said that players should assume all game makers are using GenAI, which got a rousing rejection from several game developers at the time.
So it’s no surprise that in the company’s latest Capital Markets Briefing, Lee and the company’s recently appointed executive chairman (and head of Embark Studios), Patrick Söderlund, both boasted about how Nexon’s approach to AI and GenAI in their workflow is “different” from everyone else and allegedly better.
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“Every company has a plan; most will get it wrong,” Söderlund said. “They’re committing big investments in tools – but tools won’t help because they’ve misread the challenge. AI may be a race, but the winners won’t be the first movers – the winners will be the ones who understood the challenge. Think of game development as auto mechanics. The tools are available to everyone, but not everyone has the knowledge and experience to use them. That’s where Nexon is different.“
As Lee puts it, “Our methodology doesn’t replace creative people, it frees them to create, with context.” The ‘with context’ part is referring to Nexon’s Mono Lake Initiative, which is a mass collection of the data that the company has amassed over its many years of existence.
“Mono Lake makes the intelligence available across everything we build and operate – every developer, every live ops team, every product decision has access to the base of information we’ve accumulated over decades,” Lee says. That’s how Lee claims the company is avoiding the core problem with AI, which is that “AI without context is just speed. Faster output of a generic outcome. Tools that know nothing about design history, player behavior, or innovation. Without context, AI is a race to the arithmetic middle where everyone’s games look the same. That’s not a competitive advantage. That’s noise, at scale.“
Lee then goes on to compare the rise of AI and GenAI tech to ARC Raiders, calling the extraction shooter “a Trojan Horse – a gift that contains a shift in the mindset about how technology frees developers and live service teams to spend more time thinking and less time typing. More time innovating; less time writing code.”
“It changes how people work. The tools they use, how fast they can move, what they can accomplish. But what goes into our games – the creative content our players actually experience – that remains the work of our developers. Our methodology doesn’t replace creative people, it frees them to create, with context. Today, our best people spend more time making creative decisions – decisions guided by context…context based on billions of player decisions…context that precious few companies can match.“
Putting to the side the fact that the Trojan Horse comparison doesn’t totally work when you consider that the ‘gift’ the horse contained was a horde of soldiers who burned and destroyed the city whose leaders accepted the ‘gift,’ it’s once again unsurprising to hear Nexon doubling-down on its AI bet.
The company has long been AI-focused, so seeing more support is about as surprising as seeing the sun in the morning. Though, it’s also worth noting that these comments come after Söderlund recently admitted that Embark had been replacing the GenAI voices it had for NPCs in ARC Raiders with human voices because “A real professional actor is better than AI; that’s just how it is.”
Even still, Söderlund, Lee, and the rest of Nexon are not to be deterred from their AI-led path. Whether it proves to actually be the best path for the company in the long run is to-be-determined.
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