Nexon's Embark Studios is making ambitious virtual worlds.
Nexon's Embark Studios is making ambitious virtual worlds.
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Nexon CEO Owen Mahoney: Game companies say they love innovation but resist creators at every turn

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 16 min

Owen Mahoney has grown skeptical of people who say they love innovation but fail to support creative people. The Nexon CEO brought this up in a speech at the recent Nexon Developers Conference in South Korea.

The thing is that he is kind of casting suspicion on people in roles like himself, as Mahoney is the one who has to decide whether to support the creative game developers at Nexon, which is one of the world’s largest online game companies. But he isn’t telling people to be suspicious of suits like him. Rather, he wants game company leaders to become better at communicating with each other.

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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.