NEXON Korea is hosting its annual developer conference NDC26 in Pangyo, where leadership is framing AI as a tool that levels implementation but does not replace the user understanding and trust built over time, while a NEXON Games engineer detailed a concrete TTS upgrade for Blue Archive using an open-source model.
NEXON Korea's annual developer conference NDC26 opened on June 16 in Pangyo, South Korea, with a welcome speech by CEO Lee Jung-hoon and a keynote by Co-CEO Kang Dae-hyun. Lee described AI as a revolution in creation and computation that gives everyone the same implementation tools, making the key differentiator a developer's insight into what users truly value. Kang's keynote argued that the competitive edge now lies in what he called contextual compound interest, the accumulated understanding and relationships built over time between creators and players. He contrasted this with simple interest approaches that fail to carry lessons forward. Kang cited data showing Steam releases grew from about 2,800 in 2015 to roughly 20,000 in 2025, yet only 3% received over 1,000 reviews, and 57% of playtime in 2024 went to games over six years old. He warned that while AI can produce outputs, it cannot create the promises and trust that sustain live games. The conference runs through June 18 with 51 sessions across nine tracks, including a talk from Embark Studios.
At the same conference, NEXON Games engineer Kim Myeong-ji detailed the development of a new TTS model for Blue Archive. The team adopted Style-Bert-VITS2, an open-source Japanese-focused model, to improve emotional expression and naturalness in character voices. The upgrade targets better reproduction of nuances like distress and joy, addressing specific feedback on long vowels and pitch in Japanese lines. The two stories together show NEXON Korea addressing AI both as a strategic framing for the company's direction and as a practical tool for improving a live game's user experience.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the cited Yomimono stories below, each itself
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fact links the story it came from.
Jun 18
At NEXON Developers Conference 26, NEXPACE blockchain lead Ryu Gi-hyeok presented a postmortem of five years building MapleStory Universe, the blockchain ecosystem around MapleStory. He described three walls the project hit after launch: the security risk of asset approvals, the friction of transaction fees, and the cost of vetting external builders on a permissioned chain. The talk centered on whether blockchain's permissionless ideal can coexist with a developer's responsibility to protect users.
Jun 18
Sim Eun-seop, CEO and lead programmer of Lizard Smoothie, presented a case study at NEXON's NDC26 on how the indie game Shape of Dreams sold 1 million copies within three months of its September 2024 Steam release. The team, two engineers with no art background, focused on gameplay and used a free demo as a primary marketing tool, updating it roughly 70 times over 2 years and 9 months. Data collection tools were built in to track player behavior, leading to key changes like adding WASD controls after a focus group test showed demand, and nerfing early enemy attacks that caused 45-50% death rates in the first stages.
Jun 18
At NEXON Korea's NDC26 conference, NEXON Games engineer Kim Myeong-ji detailed the development of a new TTS model for Blue Archive. The team adopted Style-Bert-VITS2, an open-source Japanese-focused model, to improve emotional expression and naturalness in character voices. The upgrade targets better reproduction of nuances like distress and joy, addressing specific feedback on long vowels and pitch in Japanese lines.
Jun 16
NEXON Korea's annual developer conference NDC26 opened on June 16 in Pangyo, South Korea, with a welcome speech by CEO Lee Jung-hoon and a keynote by Co-CEO Kang Dae-hyun. Lee described AI as a "revolution in creation and computation" that gives everyone the same implementation tools, making the key differentiator a developer's insight into what users truly value. Kang's keynote, titled "In an era where implementation becomes easy, what do we compete on?," argued that the competitive edge now lies in what he called "contextual compound interest"-the accumulated understanding and relationships built over time between creators and players. He contrasted this with "simple interest" approaches that fail to carry lessons forward. Kang cited data showing Steam releases grew from about 2,800 in 2015 to roughly 20,000 in 2025, yet only 3% received over 1,000 reviews, and 57% of playtime in 2024 went to games over six years old. He warned that while AI can produce outputs, it cannot create the promises and trust that sustain live games. The conference runs through June 18 with 51 sessions across nine tracks, including a talk from Embark Studios.