Nexon chief Owen Mahoney thinks art is the solution to mobile gaming’s rising marketing costs

Making money from mobile gaming is expensive thanks to rising costs of acquiring users, but one company wants to subvert this by treating the products it makes as a form of art, not as just a consumer product.

Nexon chief executive officer Owen Mahoney thinks that it’s rare to find a profitable company on mobile. During a fireside chat at the GamesBeat Summit in Sausalito, Mahoney explained that publishers are dealing with rising marketing costs that are destroying profit margins. But he doesn’t really think this is a marketing problem. Instead, he claims that acquiring new players is difficult because so many mobile games are all alike.