Interview: As Arc Raiders surges, Nexon CEO eyes the west (and is dreaming of gaming's "third wave")

Plus: A big shake-up at Ubisoft, and...what was the best video game made in New York?

Junghun Lee at the Nexon Developers Conference. Photo via Nexon

“I didn’t expect Arc Raiders to be this successful,” Junghun Lee, CEO of Tokyo-headquartered gaming giant Nexon, told me last week, over a video call.

“It’s had around double the amount of success that I initially anticipated.”

For a gaming CEO, that’s not a bad thing to have been wrong about.

Arc Raiders is currently one of the hottest things in gaming and easily the biggest success that Nexon, maker of Korean hits Maple Story and Dungeon & Fighter, has ever had in the west.

The multiplayer shooter surpassed 12.4 million copies sold this month, Nexon announced several days before Lee and I spoke. That performance wasn’t just better than Lee’s early guesses. It beat the company’s own year-end estimates, shared with investors in November, by around three million copies.

Arc Raiders was released on October 30 by Nexon’s lone western game development studio, the Stockholm-based Embark. It is technically a sci-fi multiplayer extraction shooter in which rifle-toting gamers cooperate and/or compete to retrieve loot from the surface of a world dominated by killer robots.

But the game has blown up, as some modern mega-hits do, as a social experience. In that way, Arc Raiders is a game of interpersonal drama: friendship, teamwork and the ever-present risk of betrayal.

Lee was aware of the game’s compelling social dynamics even before it launched. When he went to Embark during a pre-release play-test, “I told them, ‘Hey, I’m the CEO, you shouldn’t kill me,” he said. “But they killed me anyway.”

Lee hasn’t spoken much to the press about Arc Raiders or Nexon in general in the two years since he became the company’s CEO, certainly not to western media, to whom he’s granted few interviews. Search for his name online and the main hit is a much-aggregated translated interview he recently gave to a Japanese outlet about his belief that AI is already ubiquitous in game development.

Last Thursday, we spoke for an hour. We talked about Arc Raiders, about Nexon’s hopes for gaming in the west, and, of course, about his AI comments. We also spoke about his expectations for a “third wave” of gaming, “a very fun topic that I would willingly spend two to three hours just talking about.” (We did it in less time.)