In late February, Embark Studios CEO and cofounder Patrick Söderlund was named executive chairman of Nexon, the Korean publisher that purchased Embark in 2019. While Embark’s ARC Raiders was one of 2025’s notable success stories, Nexon’s elevation of Söderlund demonstrates just how much the company is betting its future on this game and everything it represents: global markets, new IP, and innovation in game development.
Nexon’s growth projections hinge heavily on this move; it forecasts a nearly 300% YoY revenue growth rate in North America and Europe from Q125 to Q126, revenue that will constitute 86% of projected global growth. Globally, PC/Console performance is expected to account for 96% of the company’s overall growth this quarter, while the segment was 71% of FY25 revenues. Though these amounts include some ARC Raiders revenue deferred from Q425 to Q126, the overall trend is clear: Nexon is doubling down on its ARC Raiders bet and planning for it to become its long-awaited fourth IP pillar that will transform the company as a whole.
Securing a Place Atop Nexon’s IP Portfolio
At its core, Nexon has focused on nurturing franchises for long-term growth. Over the past decade plus, this strategy has coalesced around three core IPs: MapleStory, Dungeon&Fighter, and the licensing of EA FC in Korea. Over recent years, numerous attempts to grow the MapleStory franchise have delivered varying degrees of success. The IP continues to perform well and constitutes roughly 30% of the company’s overall revenue, including impressive 43% YoY growth from 2024 to 2025, most of which came from Korean audiences. The IP launched a fourth SKU in 2025 - MapleStory: Idle RPG, which was reported favorably in the most recent earnings letter.
MapleStory: Idle RPG is grossing approximately $1M per day, with 600K weekly active users, according to Sensor Tower data. Contrast this with the 6M weekly ARC Raiders players mentioned in the earnings letter, and it becomes clear why Nexon believes so strongly that growth will come from its new IP over its preeminent legacy franchise. Of Nexon’s two big launches in October 2025, ARC Raiders has 10x the active users of the latest MapleStory SKU. This is all the more remarkable considering that ARC Raiders is not free-to-play or available on low-end devices, as most Nexon titles are.
ARC Raiders can be favorably compared to Nexon’s other IP in more ways as well: MapleStory and Dungeon&Fighter may have passionate fans in the West, but their appeal is heavily centered on Asian markets – and Nexon has long viewed growth in new regions as core to its success. FC is, of course, a licensed IP not owned or controlled by Nexon, which limits its growth potential. Dungeon&Fighter, for that matter, is owned by Nexon, but much of its revenue comes from licensing the IP to Tencent for use in China.
ARC Raiders, meanwhile, is wholly owned and is most popular in the Western markets that Nexon views as its biggest opportunity. Its unique art style and world-building are immediately recognizable among competitors, and offer Nexon a strong foundation for cultivating a new franchise and a new, high-value audience that it has been seeking for some time.
How is ARC Raiders Actually Performing?
Steam CCU trends suggest ARC Raiders is holding up materially better than Nexon’s two prior shooter launches and outperforming 2026’s top-selling shooter, Battlefield 6. The game’s impressive CCU durability is incredibly rare, and speaks to the quality of the core game and its early LiveOps cadence. Embark has been explicit that ARC Raiders is now a long-term focus, with a 10-year vision, expanding content plans, and roadmap visibility that signal long-term stewardship. But Embark is still thinking beyond ARC Raiders: it states that the game’s success has underwritten investment in two new projects.
Embark should leverage its own unique strengths in game development to keep shipping large, innovative features for ARC Raiders - while starting to lean on Nexon’s strengths in day-to-day live services operations so it can reserve its unique resources for new game development. It is worth continuing to support THE FINALS, but both Embark and Nexon must recognize which Embark title has earned the right to become the flagship and distribute resources accordingly.
Nexon’s Long History with Western Game Development
Nexon’s IP ambitions were finally realized with Embark with the release of ARC Raiders, but this success came only after many years of patience, and even failure, to build products in Western countries.
Embark’s innovative development processes and lean team have been well-publicized and often held up as a counterexample to the bloated, inefficient development approach commonly portrayed as widespread across Western studios. However, ARC Raiders still took seven years to come to market after the studio was founded in 2018 (and the game announced in 2021), incurring significant costs as the studio pivoted the core game design and business model, and even decided to release THE FINALS first, all while investing heavily into developing its proprietary tech.
This was far from a clean, pivot-less development cycle (even if Embark still shipped one of 2026’s top shooters with far fewer headcount than Battlefield 6 required). All the while, many studios fitting Embark’s profile — Western, live-service-oriented, founded by AAA veterans — failed to sustain their own innovative games, and other large Asian publishers loudly exited Western game development. Nexon’s patience and continued support for Embark, in the face of considerable countersignals across several years, has paid off.
Embark was far from Nexon’s only bet on Western game development, though it is just as much a bet on extreme talent and innovation in development methods. Nexon previously purchased Maryland-based mobile developer Big Huge Games, developer of DomiNations, in 2016. In 2017, Nexon published LawBreakers, from famed Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski’s studio Boss Key Productions. More recently, it signed a deal with venture-backed Theorycraft Games to publish the studio’s title Supervive, which ultimately failed in South Korea. Nexon even sunk an impressive $400M as AGBO, the film production studio from the Russo Brothers filmmakers, developed an interest in virtual worlds. All of these investments, which were being placed more or less concurrently with Nexon’s deals with Embark, have amounted to little for the company.
And of course, Nexon is unique among the major Asian gaming publishers in that it was led by a Westerner — Owen Mahoney, whom Naavik first interviewed in 2023 — for many years. Mahoney led Nexon’s investment and acquisition of Embark before departing in 2025, and now Nexon once again has appointed a Westerner to the highest levels of leadership, as executive chairman, in Söderlund.
Adopting Embark’s Development Philosophy
One of the bigger questions is to what extent Söderlund and Embark’s rising prominence within Nexon is meant to influence the broader organization’s development processes. Embark was founded in part to rethink game development from the ground up: leveraging new technologies, scalable backend architecture, and leaner production methodologies to build high-fidelity experiences with smaller teams. While that bet required patience, its payoff with ARC Raiders positions Embark less as a boutique experiment and more as a proof of concept whose lessons could be brought to other studios.
There will almost certainly be opportunities to share these practices across Nexon’s portfolio, particularly around technical infrastructure, tooling, LiveOps server backend architecture, and production workflows. However, this is not a one-way transfer of expertise. Nexon touts how its decades of live-service experience in operating long-running franchises are already influencing how Embark approaches the post-launch phase of ARC Raiders. Embark may have reimagined how to build a modern shooter efficiently, but Nexon brings institutional knowledge about how to sustain and scale it over years.
Importantly, Nexon is unlikely to “blow up” what is already working within its leading franchises. The company’s live-service powerhouses are finely tuned machines, and a wholesale copy-paste of Embark’s 300-person Swedish culture onto a 9,000-person Asian organization would be both impractical and unnecessary. Instead, change is more likely to diffuse gradually, trickling into existing teams where it can incrementally improve efficiency, while exerting its strongest influence on new projects still in formation.
That may ultimately be the real lever of transformation. If Embark’s philosophy enables Nexon to build future AAA-scale titles with leaner teams, tighter iteration loops, and more flexible technical foundations (while Nexon’s operational muscle ensures those titles compound value post-launch), the impact would extend well beyond ARC Raiders itself. In that scenario, Embark does not replace Nexon’s traditional strengths; it integrates with them, pairing operational excellence with a more modern, efficient model of development.
2026: Nexon’s Inflection Point
Taken together, 2026 feels like an inflection point for Nexon. After years of experimentation (and more than a few false starts), the company can plausibly argue it has entered a new era in its long quest to cement itself as a truly global publisher. With ARC Raiders emerging as a potential fourth IP pillar alongside MapleStory and Dungeon&Fighter, Nexon now commands a more diversified audience across regions, platforms, and genres. Just as importantly, it is pairing new IP momentum with a development model that promises greater capital efficiency and creative ambition.
The plan ahead looks like continued expansion of ARC Raiders, steady stewardship of other franchises, and additional projects incubating within Embark and across Nexon’s broader portfolio, all of which may benefit from Embark’s lessons and practices. If it all plays out how Nexon hopes it will, ARC Raiders is not a one-hit moment but a structural shift. CEO Junghun Lee has spoken openly about his desire to push innovation in game development to complement Nexon’s operational strengths; if 2025 proves the model can work, 2026 will test whether Nexon can scale it — and, in doing so, redefine what the next decade of the company looks like.
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In Other News
💸 Funding & Acquisitions:
- Supercell and King alumni Antihero raise $4.5M to launch extraction shooter Misfitz.
- Istanbul-based Vento Games has raised $4M in a seed funding round to expand its portfolio of family-friendly mobile puzzle titles.
- Hamburg-based Minit Games raises $2M to bring instant play gaming into the feed era.
- Mobile games studio Playard has received investment from Replay Global to expand its team and grow its game portfolio.
- US-based investment firm Shamrock Capital has acquired gaming-focused creative agency Mutiny from Trailer Park Group for an undisclosed sum.
- UK-based games developer Splash Damage has acquired Croatia-based studio Gamepires from RuneScape developer Jagex.
📊 Business & Products:
- Sony Pulls Back From PlayStation Games on PC.
- Google resolves dispute with Epic Games, reduces app store fees to 20%.
- Netflix boss says Paramount acquisition of Warner Bros will result in "cuts in excess of $16 billion" within "18 months or so".
- Paramount makes no reference to game studios in first WB call to investors.
- US government may compel Tencent to divest gaming investments.
- Resident Evil: Requiem hits 334,214 concurrent players over launch weekend, breaking franchise record.
👾 Miscellaneous:
- Hypixel Studios and CurseForge launch $100K modding contest for Hytale creators.
- Türkiye backs games studios with an array of new incentives and financial support.
- UK government opens consultation on social media age restriction, curfews and games crackdown.
- Pokémon Go celebrates 30 years of Pokémon with rare encounters and web shop promotions.
- EA announces UGC marketplace for The Sims 4.
- How King grew Pet Rescue Saga to $1B and sustained it for over a decade.
Content Worth Consuming
"We Now Have a Clear Vision for How Sumo Fits into the New World" — inside the Slimmed-Down Sumo Digital (gamesindustry.biz): “Five years ago, Sumo was relentlessly expanding into a UK publishing powerhouse. After years of successful work-for-hire and co-development work on titles from Dead Island to Sackboy: A Big Adventure, the company steadily acquired other studios, including co-dev specialists Red Kite, Lab42, and PixelAnt and indie teams The Chinese Room and Auroch Digital. A push into developing its own IP began with 2017's Snake Pass, born from an internal game jam, and in 2021 it launched Canadian dev Timbre Games and in-house publishing label Secret Mode.”
Why 2026 is a Defining Year for Mobile Games (metacoregames.com): “Looking back at 2025, it feels like we closed the final chapter in a multi-year correction cycle. After more than a decade of uninterrupted growth, between 2022–2024 the mobile games market went through its first meaningful decline, and only last year began to find its footing again. During the past years, the industry was forced to adjust to structural changes: privacy shifts, rising UA costs, maturing genres, and the collapse of many playbooks that worked reliably for years. It has been a testing period for almost everyone. Competition intensified while predictability declined. The companies that survived did so not because they were the largest, but because they adapted the fastest.”
Mobile Gaming OG Akin Babayigit: The Real Truth About Mobile Gaming Success (two & a half gamers YouTube Channel): “This episode is special. We sit down with Akin Babayigit — early Facebook gaming, Audience Network launch team, King, co-founder of Tripledot, investor at Arcadia — to talk about what actually builds winning game studios”.
Games and AI(with Joost van Dreunen) (Mobile Dev Memo Podcast): “On this week's episode of the podcast, I am joined by Joost van Dreunen, the CEO of Aldora, an adjunct professor at NYU, and the author of the SuperJoost Playslist Blog as well as the book One Up. We dive into the profound impact of generative artificial intelligence on the video game industry, exploring the immediate market reactions to new tools and the long-term implications for creative production.”
Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel on the Remarkable Success of Mewgenics (The Game Business YouTube Channel): “Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac's Edmund McMillen has done it again. Mewgenics has sold one million copies in just a week and is one of this year's breakout indie hits. In this interview with McMillen and Tyler Glaiel, we discuss the Mewgenics story, why it took so long to make, and why the duo avoid working with publishers at all costs.”
The State of Games Writing with Writer and Narrative Director Cara Ellison (The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook): “Karrie Shao chats with writer and narrative designer Cara Ellison. Together they discuss her path from television to games; the global development scene and the difficulties facing developers today; her desire to bring local culture to the global stage; and her work with Fireproof Games on the D.I.C.E. Award winning VR title, Ghost Town.”
More About Naavik
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