Nexon’s CEO recently sat down for an interview at the Tokyo Game Show and started talking about his career, the growth of Nexon, and what it takes to build a successful game. Nexon is one of the world’s biggest developers and publishers of games, and most recently, the brand has been in the news because of certain character designs in The First Descendant, an action-MMO game.
Speaking candidly, Park Yong-Hyun, the CEO of Nexon Games, said that user feedback is infinitely more important than numbers and historical data when it comes to assembling a game.
‘Numbers Will Not Produce Good Results’
In an interview with 4Gamer, Park Yong-Hyun, the CEO of Nexon Games, suggested that community feedback is one of the most important resources a studio can listen to when piecing together a game.
Now that costs are high, I think that on the contrary, setting a strict budget and moving based on the numbers will not produce good results. If you rely on user feedback, it may make a difference in whether it sells or sells more, but I don’t think it will be the case that the development costs will go to waste if it doesn’t sell at all.
Yong-Hyun mentioned that ‘making games by calculating backwards form numbers was fine in the past,’ suggesting that the prior success of games and what went well back then isn’t enough to base the development of a new game on.
I think that focusing on user feedback is the most reliable standard at present … I think that if you confidently tell the upper management, “This game will be well received by users!”, it will be accepted, but I don’t think it will work if you say, “We can make this much money.” This is because the sales figures change depending on various circumstances.
Nexon recently made some major changes to The First Descendant, an all-new action MMO that was released in July to a mixed reception. In recent days, the brand has piqued the interest of gamers everywhere on social media following the reveal of Ultimate Freyna, a more powerful variant of a base character with one of the most revealing outfits we’ve ever seen in a game.
The community response to this character was monumental, and a fervour set about the market that was indicative of the skin selling well despite not yet having hit the market. Ultimate Freyna was added to The First Descendant on October 10 and has been turning heads since.
What do you think? Do you believe that game developers must listen to their communities if they want to succeed? Let us know on the Insider Gaming forum.
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