The office of mobile game company Bagelcode on Teheran-ro in Gangnam District, Seoul, was warmed by the energy of its employees. The company held back-to-back in-house game development contests in Mar., "GameJam" and "AI First Fair," and received results that surprised even itself.
Over the seven-day contest period, 124 mobile games were completed. Compared with nine completed works at the same event three years ago, it was not a simple increase but a leap in productivity.
The preparation period was cut from 60 days to 7, and the number of participating teams rose from 10 to 124. The final winners are not chosen by judges but determined by user return rates after release on app stores.
Bagelcode is a mid-sized game developer in its 14th year since founding. Games that brought casino play to mobile found success, pushing 2025 revenue past 100 billion won. We asked co-CEO Kim Jun-young and employees about the secret behind the explosive productivity.
AI production engine rollout... surge in individual participants
"Since ChatGPT first came out in Nov. 2023, I've barely slept. I sensed the change artificial intelligence (AI) would bring, and I thought the opportunity would pass in a flash."
That was from CEO Kim Jun-young. Bagelcode immediately began developing its own AI-based game production engine, "GameBakery.ai." At the same time, it encouraged employees to use a variety of AI tools without worrying about token consumption.
The explosive increase in completed works at this contest owed to the first rollout of GameBakery, developed over the past two years, and to employees' improved AI literacy working in tandem.
Data scientist Song Ha-young, who took part in the contest, said, "I made a game where an alchemist creates new weapons by combining various materials, and I was able to build the materials combination databases at an incomparable speed to previous years."
Public relations chief Kim Yoo-jung said, "Three years ago, there wasn't a single individual participant, but this time 88% of participants were individuals," adding, "It was also meaningful to confirm that an era has opened where one member can handle what used to be done by teams."
A “SaaS-pocalypse” unfolding in real time
The "AI First meeting" chaired by CEO Kim Jun-young is held four to five times a week. It started as a meeting only for AI-related departments, but has expanded into an open meeting that any employee can join online or offline.
At the meeting the reporter attended, the project management tool "ToDos," developed by the AI Lab team, was the main agenda item.
"The existing collaboration tool 'Jira (the world's most used collaboration tool for project management and issue tracking)' requires a lot of manual input. With game productivity rising sharply, we couldn't manage game histories in the old way, so we built our own tool called 'ToDos.'"
"Our team decided to modify part of ToDos' code, developed by the AI Lab team, to fit our situation. Since we're a team of artists, we also made the UI (user interface) more intuitive and colorful."
The "SaaS-pocalypse" raised on Wall Street in the United States — the outlook that existing software-as-a-service will be replaced by AI — was not an exaggeration. On the ground, the mood was shifting toward building and using needed tools in-house.
What if big tech builds it all?
The reporter asked, "If big tech like OpenAI or Google updates the related features, wouldn't your painstaking work collapse?" In fact, there's talk that when big tech updates features of AI services, dozens of startups disappear.
CEO Kim Jun-young said, "We've actually experienced that countless times," adding, "Back in the ChatGPT 3.5 era, various tools we developed ourselves, including MCP (Model Context Protocol), have now outlived their usefulness."
Kim still stressed that preliminary research must not stop. That's because the level of technical understanding differs between an organization that simply "uses" features and one that has wrestled with why those features are needed and has "built" them.
He added, "It may look like big tech is building every feature, but they still haven't reached the realm of making 'fun games,'" noting, "In that sense, 2026 is the last window for game developers to widen the gap and keep the initiative."
AI is speed; people set the direction
The most important lesson Bagelcode learned from pushing AI transformation over two years is that AI is ultimately an "accelerator," and it is people who decide the direction. AI without direction will race out of control like a supercar without a steering wheel.
The reason Bagelcode has held in-house hackathons like GameJam every year since 2023 is to let all members freely experiment with new technologies and apply them to work. Projects discovered at hackathons lead to further development and are reflected in real work.
Now, Bagelcode's in-house code output has surged from about 10 items a day to 100–200. It has entered a stage where managing code by hand is difficult.
On top of that, if the AI engine "GameBakery," first applied to game development, is expanded companywide to marketing and operations, the pace of code production will only steepen.
Bagelcode has decided to redesign its work environment in the process. In the first half of the year, it plans to provide every employee with a Mac mini and build a "one-person AI agent" work setup in which each runs one or more agents.
The Mac mini is an ultra-compact desktop with only the main unit. As the open-source AI agent framework "OpenClaw" has trended recently, this device has also gained popularity.
Employees have begun to envision leaving tasks like sorting messages and emails and repetitive data processing to agents and focusing on more important judgment and planning.
At Bagelcode, AI is no longer a declaration or a slogan. It is the language of execution: building directly, modifying, and integrating it into work.
CEO Kim Jun-young said, "Games are a comprehensive art in which the entire process — planning, art, development, data, operations, and customer support — is connected," adding, "Talent with deep domain knowledge in each field augmented by AI and creating synergy with one another — that will be the moat we build."