Seungwon Lee, chief global officer at Netmarble Games
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As free-to-play mobile games go global, so does South Korea’s Netmarble

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 11 min

Netmarble Games grew up in the shadow of South Korea’s Nexon, but it moved to free-to-play mobile games in a timely way. Last year, it launched the huge mobile role-playing game Marvel: Future Fight, invested $130 million into casual game publisher SGN, and generated nearly $1 billion in sales. Now it ranks as No. 8 on the global list of the largest mobile game companies.

I caught up with Seungwon Lee, chief global officer at Netmarble Games, for interview at the Game Developers Conference last week. We talked about Netmarble’s rise in free-to-play games, as well as the unique characteristics of the Korean mobile game market and what makes it a haven for games.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.