Nexon chief Owen Mahoney explains deal with Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski (interview)

Nexon, the Asian online gaming giant, is known for free-to-play online games like MapleStory, KartRider, and Dungeon Fighter Online. Those are popular titles, but they haven’t made Nexon into a household name in the West. To accomplish that, the pioneer of free-to-play titles has turned to well-know Western game developers.

Tokyo-based Nexon is working on its own internal online, social, and mobile games. But it has also cut publishing deals with prominent external developers, including one with Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski (you can read about why he choose Nexon here), who recently started a PC first-person shooter game at his new studio Boss Key Productions. Nexon is also funding titles from Splash Damage, whose Dirty Bomb first-person shooter for the PC arrives this fall. It is also working with Brian Reynolds, creator of Rise of Nations and former chief game designer at Zynga, on a new mobile strategy game at his SecretNewCo.

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And Nexon is fronting money to United Front Games, Robert Bowling’s Robotoki, and John Schappert’s Shiver Entertainment. All of these indie dev studios have seasoned and well-known developers. We talked with Nexon’s new chief executive, Owen Mahoney, about these deals and the crossover between East and West, which is a major theme of our GamesBeat 2014 conference. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

GamesBeat: So tell us about your latest publishing deal with Cliff Bleszinski. How did you make that happen? How did you two meet?

Owen Mahoney: This goes back several months. Cliff is one of those guys we have a lot of respect for. We’ve been watching him closely. We’ve played his games in the past and liked them a lot. As he was getting ready to do his next thing, he made contact—Actually, I’m not sure who contacted who first. I think we did. But we liked what he had to say about where he was going. As you know, he’s very vocal about the types of games that he likes to make and what he believes. We found that our general philosophies were very much in line.

I hadn’t met him before, and I didn’t meet him until a little later in the process, after we’d started discussions. But we really hit it off. He had a lot of suspicions about free-to-play. He wasn’t that knowledgeable about the types of games we’re doing. We were able to talk about where we’ve been and what we know and where we’re going. A lot of our discussion resonated with him, and his vision of what he wanted to build certainly resonated with us.

GamesBeat: He’s certainly vocal. I don’t know if he’s often too vocal sometimes for the tastes of some publishers. Did that give you any pause? Or was that something that made him more attractive to you?

Mahoney: Anybody who cares deeply about art and the games business is going to be pretty opinionated. Certainly I am. If you care about games as an art form, the natural outgrowth of that is to have big opinions about what is and isn’t good. Not only does that not scare me personally, I find it refreshing. The things he’s opinionated about happen to be things that I and everybody else at Nexon feel opinionated about as well.

GamesBeat: What about Cliff’s category of games? How ready is the mobile market for that kind of shooter, the quality of game that he’s been known to make? (Bleszinski’s game is a PC title).

Mahoney: From a technology perspective it’s pretty ready, and it’s getting more ready every day. You and I have talked about that. The platform itself is getting very powerful. It’s harder and harder for me to tell the difference, from a technology perspective, between my Macbook Air and my iPad Mini. There’s strong graphics processing capability in a mobile device. There’s strong networking capability. They’re getting better every day.

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There are questions about input and output – the glass input and the screen size on output. But a lot of innovation can happen. Under the hood we have devices getting stronger and stronger. I see a convergence happening between what we currently call mobile devices and what we currently call PCs. When you talk to Apple, Google, and Samsung, they’re heading in the direction of a convergence of devices.

GamesBeat: A lot of your deals are very interesting. You have Brian Reynolds and John Schappert as well. But they’re also pretty new. What sort of experience do you guys feel like you’ve gained so far from some of these high-profile relationships?

Mahoney: It’s too early to say, I think, what we’ve learned yet. We haven’t launched any games as a result of those deals, although they’ll be coming over the course of the next 12 months. What we’re finding is that if you take the perspective that the number one most important thing is fun, and you combine that with our knowledge of free-to-play, you end up having interesting conversations, and very productive conversations, about what kind of online game you can make.

We’re finding that at the working level, on the production and creation side, we have a lot of nice creative synergies happening. From each of the several deals that we’ve done over the last 12 to 18 months, those teams have been over to Korea. Our teams have been over to their offices. We’ve done a lot of cross-pollination of ideas. People who come from the perspective of game quality can have interesting and fun conversations. I’d say that at a working level, we’re finding it very energizing. We learn. They learn. It’s fun for us to be creating games with people like that.

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By contrast, just as a side note, it’s when people over-focus on how to make a lot of money that the conversations start to break down. Fortunately, we haven’t had any conversations like that. We’ve been very happy and satisfied so far. Everyone’s attacking it from the perspective of how to make a really good game.

GamesBeat: When we were at E3, you mentioned how there were probably something like five bad years in the games business, from a creative perspective. Connecting with Cliff, I wonder whether you guys talked about that, whether you feel more optimistic now.

Mahoney: At least for us, we’ve been able to find the types of people that we want to be building games with. That’s made me happy. Cliff is a great example of that. But then again, United Front Games, Splash Damage, Shiver, John Schappert, Robert Bowling, they all have the same perspective that we do. They were all feeling many of the same trends that were frustrating me personally, and us as a company. It was hard, a few years ago, to talk about games without getting overwhelmed by things that didn’t have much to do with game quality or fun.

I’m more optimistic than I have been in several years now. The people that we’re finding, at least, are emerging and saying, “Let’s go back to our core. Why did we get into this business in the first place? We did this because we love games as an art form. We like to have fun. We want to create fun experiences and find a big audience that agrees with us on that.”

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We’ll see how it turns out. When you’re focusing on creating a really fun and different game, you have a very high bar creatively. It’s hard to make really good games. It’s a lot harder to make good games than it is to push making a lot of money in the near term. It holds us to a higher and harder creative standard. But that’s what we’re here for. That’s what’s inspiring to us.

By being very clear about what we’re interested in and not interested in, we end up finding more people who have the same interests as us. That’s been helpful as well.

GamesBeat: If I looked at Hearthstone and Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans, it still looks to me like, in mobile, the best-designed game doesn’t necessarily win.

Mahoney: You don’t think Hearthstone is a good game?

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GamesBeat: I think it’s a great game design. I think it’s better than those other two I mentioned. But it’s not making as much money yet.

Mahoney: What we’ve learned is that it’s a long game. What it happens to be doing this month is a lot less relevant than how long people keep playing this game. One of the interesting things about Candy Crush is it’s stuck around for a long time. So has Clash of Clans. With Hearthstone, my personal prediction is that it’ll be here a very long time. It’s going to retain people really well. As we’ve learned, if you have a game that sticks around for a few years and people want to keep playing it for years on end, you’ll do a very robust and healthy business over time.

You and I have both seen the app charts where you have a game that explodes on a scene and goes away the next month. That happens not just on mobile, but also on PC. That’s not an area where we tend to focus. I don’t think it’s a good business when you have a flash in the pan. Our creative focus on building games that we’ll want to play for years on end. We also think that’s very good business.

GamesBeat: It seems like, with Cliff and the others, that what Nexon’s has to offer has a lot to do with monetization and some other important non-game-design areas.

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Mahoney: Yeah, but those are all design-related areas. Game balance is extremely important in any online game. Game balance in a free game is even harder and more central to what you do. You can create items in a game that will drive users away — users who are paying and users who are not paying. You want to avoid that. That’s up at 30,000 feet, but really, when you get into the nitty-gritty, that’s where the art is, and it’s very hard to do. That’s where years of experience help. We’ve been through all that brain damage in the past.

GamesBeat: You guys do have experience in the shooter market. What do you think Nexon brings to the conversation there?

Mahoney: We have several shooters around the world. You’re probably familiar with Combat Arms in the U.S. In Korea the number one shooter is a game called Sudden Attack, one of our games. We’ve also worked with Valve for Counter-Strike Online, where they provided the IP and code and art assets and we built a free-to-play version for Korea, Japan, and China. That game has done very well.

Within those games, we’ve developed a whole lot of experience on how to do a free-to-play shooter and have it work well. Game balance is a big deal in a shooter – map design and so on. We’ve done a lot of experimentation to make that work well.

Every game is different. For example, in Counter-Strike Online in China, probably the most popular aspect of that is the zombie mode. It’s a lot of fun. People have responded well to that. But that came out of pure experimentation with different modes that people will love to play. That’s not a preview of anything that Cliff is doing. It’s just to say that we’ve learned from a lot of different experiences in a lot of different countries about what works well in a free-to-play shooter.

GamesBeat: It’s interesting that the Asian market is so different. I wonder how the content from these western developers is going to do over there.

Mahoney: It’s going to go on a case-by-case basis. There was a belief among western developers a few years ago that the core thing that was missing in Asia was graphics fidelity and physics. Based on the introduction of several western free-to-play games in the Asian market that have performed up to expectations, I think people are understanding that graphics fidelity is one point of differentiation, but core gameplay is much more important.

We see over and over again, someone in the west saying, “I look at those Asian games and they don’t look as good.” Then they introduce a game that to their eyes looks better, and they find that it doesn’t do well in Asia. Then they scratch their head and wonder why that’s the case. Graphical fidelity is one point of differentiation, but it’s not the primary point of differentiation. Often it’s maybe a couple or several rungs down from the top.

GamesBeat: The one that puzzles me a little is SmileGate’s CrossFire. Why is that doing so well out there?

Mahoney: I can’t speak for CrossFire because we don’t make it. But let’s use a different example. Why is Minecraft so popular among kids in the United States, kids who have so much graphical fidelity at their fingertips? My sons love to play Minecraft. They love to play Maple Story. They’re eight and 10. Neither of those games represent state-of-the-art graphics, and yet they love those games.

We’re already past the point of diminishing returns in graphical fidelity. That’s what we believe. It’s nothing against having great graphics. It’s just to say that having the same game as the other guy with more polygons is probably not such a great selling point anymore. You have to do something that’s much harder than throwing more polygons on the screen. You have to craft a great game where people say, “That game experience was a lot of fun.”

GamesBeat: Cliff noted that he valued creative freedom. I think you folks encourage that. I do wonder what happens when you have that conversation about a milestone that a developer’s supposed to hit and what happens if they miss it. How do you engage in that typical publisher-developer conversation?

Mahoney: It’s a couple of things. One, you start with a point of selection as far as the types of people you want to work with. This is probably going to sound naïve, but I don’t think it is. I think it comes from some hard-headed business sense. You need to be selective of the types of people you work with. Cliff did his due diligence on us and we certainly did it on Cliff. We asked ourselves a lot of questions. What does he care about? Is that in line with what we care about?

The second thing is, what are you really trying to get to? You have to ship a game, a great game. If you’re both in alignment on that, you’re probably going to come to the right solution. As far as creative freedom goes, for some people that may be a euphemism for spending five years developing a game and not getting it out the door. But when you’re selecting for people who want to ship great games, you’re going to start off the conversation pretty aligned.

We chose Cliff as a partner, and he chose us, because we both bring our respective expertise to the table. Once you bring that, you have to respect your partner’s expertise. We don’t want to get in the business of telling Cliff how to make a great game, telling him what he already knows. We expect Cliff to do that. We want to bring things that we know better. If you take your partnering philosophy as lead, follow, or get out of the way, you have to figure out what you lead with and what they lead with. Then you’re going to have a productive discussion.

Where I think developers and publishers start to have conflict, the publisher says, “No, you should make this color palette. You should tweak this in that way.” And the developer says, “No, I know more about this than you do. Let me work on it.” We’d certainly agree with that. The old stories, just to use an analogy from the movie business—There’s the old discussion about producers and writers and directors in conflict. The producer wants to be a director or a writer, so they want to make changes, and because they’re financing the movie they think that they should be able to do that. But the director needs the freedom to build the piece of art that they’d like. Those types of conflicts also happen in the games business.

What we’re doing is bringing our very unique, very specific, and very deep expertise to the table. Then we’re selecting partners who bring their own unique, specific, and deep expertise. We want to combine those all. What we don’t want to do is tell them something they already know.

GamesBeat: Cliff is starting to assemble his team. Do you watch that with interest as well?

Mahoney: Absolutely. We like to have high-bandwidth communication with everyone. We like to help where we can. But the great thing about Cliff, he knows what he wants. He knows how to go build it. If you look down the line of all the folks we’ve been partnering with, that’s true of all of them.

GamesBeat: In Cliff’s case, he retired from Epic. He probably cashed out pretty handsomely. It doesn’t seem like he necessarily needed someone else’s money to make games. When you have that situation, why do you still wind up having a relationship where one company is financing the other?

Mahoney: I can’t speak for his objectives. From our perspective, we’re willing to put time, effort, and in some cases money behind game-makers who we think are good, who have a viewpoint and have a lot to prove and have a lot to show the world.

GamesBeat: As far as timing goes, are there some things happening that make a game from Cliff ripe for the way the market’s turning right now?

Mahoney: I’ll answer that from a consumer’s perspective. You play a lot of games, right? You may or may not agree with this, but I can think of a lot of games that I’d like to play — different genres, better quality, different platforms, different online components. I can think of a lot of new features for games I like to play that I think would improve them. There’s a lot of room for more and better games.

When that happens, you bring back existing gamers. It’s not a static pie. You bring people who are inclined to play games into playing more games. You bring in gamers from other games that are not as good. You bring new gamers into the market.

To me the timing is always good. In the art business, it’s not a static business. There’s always room for creative improvement.

GamesBeat: Is there anything else exciting you that’s come up since we talked at E3?

Mahoney: Going back to a broader perspective, I think about six months ago you said that we were starting to get pretty interesting as a company. I don’t know if you still believe that, but I believe that. What’s exciting me is several things that we’re doing – both in terms of our internal studios, where we have several games we’ll be launching over the next 18 months, and also our external partnerships, where we also have several new games launching over the next 12 to 18 months.

Not all of those will be successful. I’m sure of that. I don’t know which will and won’t be, but in any group of games, some are going to be successful and some aren’t. But what you will find is that we’re raising the creative bar for online games around the world. We hope that what we’re doing is replicated by other companies. It’s going to make for a much more fun and exciting games industry.

We’re in the process of showing the world what a really fun online game is. I like our slate that’s coming out. As we launch those games, people can play them and tell us what they think. We’re going to be looking very hard at that feedback. It’s going to be pretty neat, certainly from a creative perspective. We’re working hard to do things that’ll make us proud, this year and five years or 10 years from now. We’ll be able to look back and say that we did some cool stuff.