Nexon, the developer and publisher behind MMOs like The First Descendant, doesn't rely on a game's potential profit to ensure its success – instead, the company looks to the "raw voices of users" while working on new titles.
As reported and translated by Automaton, Nexon CEO Yong-hyun Park describes why feedback is valuable in a recent interview with 4Gamer. When asked how the studio assesses any potential games, Park reveals a process that involves users' direct opinions rather than any analysis of market data or profit predictions – and this is partially due to a lack of prior solid examples of similar releases to look back to, at least in South Korea.
"If it's an MMORPG, we can roughly imagine how it will perform," Park states. "However, when it comes to titles like Blue Archive or The First Descendant, neither my company nor I personally have experience making and releasing such games to the market, and even in Korea, these kinds of games have hardly been made up until now." Considering this lack of data, Nexon prefers to "run with projects" without any defined performance forecast.
According to Park, this applies to the company's production process even with titles that cost $70 million or more. An absence of pre-existing data isn't the only reason, either – he simply doesn't trust the numbers while trying to assess a game's potential success. He prefers to look to the "raw voices of users" instead. "Working backwards based on the profit you want to achieve with your game used to work fine in the past, when production costs were low."
Now that development costs are "gradually increasing," though, as well as "errors in the numbers can accumulate," Park says "you can find your game falling apart at release." That's why he believes that "focusing on user feedback is the most reliable method at the moment." Nexon "may not know how much money we can make by developing a certain game, but we can get a feeling as to what kind of game will make users happy."
That’s why the company opts to test games with players, "even in the middle of development and collect feedback." This feedback may not be able to provide developers with direct data about the number of downloads or purchases they can expect, but it's how they can "find out whether users would like to play our game and come back to it, and we choose to believe in this and run with it."
