Mike Vorhaus (right) of Magid Advisors interviews Owen Mahoney of Nexon at GamesBeat 2015.
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Nexon wins over Western developers by pitching gaming as an art form

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 12 min

Nexon is a pioneer of free-to-play online games in Asia, and it wants to break into the West in a big way.

A couple of years ago, the Tokyo-based, South Korean-born company appointed Owen Mahoney, a former Electronic Arts executive from the U.S., as its CEO. And he has been on a quest to sign up as many third-party Western game developers as he can to help Nexon expand into the global $30 billion mobile gaming market, as well as the online gaming market worldwide.

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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.