South Korea’s Netmarble uses Marvel to bring its mobile games to the West

Netmarble Games has grown to nearly $1 billion in sales. That’s a long way from its humble beginnings in 2000, when Jun-Hyuk Bang started the South Korean game company. He had only $88,000 and eight employees in the beginning. They built an online game publishing business that mushroomed over time.

Bang introduced free-to-play games such as Catch Mind and Nova 1492, as well as a voucher-based payment system. Bang left the company in 2006 for health reasons, but he returned in June 2011. Bang then turned the company’s focus to mobile games. Within five years, that bet paid off. Revenues grew to $948 million last year. At the end of 2014, Netmarble received $500 million from Chinese social media and game company Tencent.