Owen Mahoney, CEO of Nexon, believes artists should run the game industry.
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Nexon courts Western game developers with creativity pitch

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 16 min

Owen Mahoney, CEO of Asian gaming giant Nexon, has been fed up with the mobile game malaise where millions of rivals are competing with each other in a race to the bottom. He wants them to be in a race to creativity as the only way to stand out in the pack.

While Mahoney is a business executive himself, he wants the artists who create games to win. Usually, he finds, these creators are often shouted out of the board rooms by the more eloquent business executives who are better trained when it comes to making PowerPoint presentations to boards.

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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.