Owen Mahoney, CEO of Nexon, believes artists should run the game industry.
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Nexon’s Owen Mahoney: Artistry is key to solving mobile gaming’s malaise

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 13 min

At his core, Owen Mahoney is a business guy. But the chief executive of Asian gaming giant Nexon doesn’t talk like one. At our recent GamesBeat Summit event in Sausalito, I sat down with Mahoney for a fireside chat about the state of the mobile gaming business.

And while his business is good and growing, he wasn’t happy about the state of affairs for game developers. The artists who create games 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.