Nexon's new CEO wants creative devs, free-to-play to be fair — and cloners to take a hike (interview)

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
June 17, 2014
Updated June 18, 2025
15 min

Owen Mahoney is a gamer. The chief executive of Nexon, the Tokyo-based online gaming giant that pioneered free-to-play games, is unhappy with the state of the industry. He says that for the past five years, creativity hasn’t been rewarded.

Companies that clone other titles or figure out how to rip off gamers with free-to-play scams are getting rich, while those that are truly creative are getting lost. That’s one reason why Mahoney, who became CEO of Nexon in March, has been seeking out seasoned game creators. He has invested in Western game comapnies such as Rumble Entertainment, John Schappert’s Shiver Entertainment, and Brian Reynolds’ SecretNewCo.

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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.