Nexon put forward "context" as the key competitive edge for the game industry in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). While AI has lowered production expense and made it easy for anyone to build games, the company said the experience and trust accumulated with users over a long time cannot be replaced by AI.
On the 16th, Nexon Japan CEO Lee Jung-heon said in a welcome address at the Nexon Developer Conference (NDC) 2026 held at the Gyeonggi Center for Creative Economy & Innovation in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, "What AI does well are tasks with predetermined answers," adding, "Inside games, it is people, not AI, who read the stories and empathy created among users."
NDC is a knowledge-sharing event for the game industry hosted by Nexon. It began in 2007 as a small in-house presentation and marks its 19th year this year. At this NDC, a total of 51 presentation sessions will cover the entire spectrum of game development, from game design to production, operations, and programming.
Lee emphasized that the technological environment of the game industry is changing rapidly with the recent adoption of AI. He said, "AI is an unstoppable, expansive wave of change and a revolution in creation and computation," adding, "It is lowering the marginal expense of generating and analyzing information and content to near zero (0)."
However, Lee said AI should be accepted as a tool, not as a competitor to humans. While AI can speed up implementation and analysis, it cannot replace solving undefined problems or the process of creating empathy and emotion between people. He said, "At the point where everyone holds the same tool—AI—what creates the difference is ultimately the insight and judgment about what to make."
Lee said the standard for such judgments must come from users. What users are interested in, and whether they can be made to feel it is worth willingly spending time in a game world, should be the most important criterion for deciding what to build with new technologies.
Kang Dae-hyun, co-CEO of Nexon Korea, expressed a similar concern in a keynote speech titled "In an era when implementation is getting easier, what do we compete on?"
According to Kang, about 2,800 games were released on Steam in 2015, but that number grew to about 20,000 in 2025. That is roughly a sevenfold increase in 10 years. By contrast, among the roughly 20,000 games, only 608 had more than 1,000 reviews, just about 3% of the total.
With the spread of AI, commercial engines, and digital distribution, the barriers to building and launching games have fallen, but winning selection in the market is becoming even harder. He said, "Supply is exploding, but a user's day is still 24 hours," adding, "The more choices there are, the more users stay where they can be sure."
Kang saw the industry's competitiveness in this environment shifting beyond simple graphics or implementation levels to the "depth of context." Here, context refers to the asset accumulated over a long time around a game—such as developers' honed know-how and sensibilities, the relationships and memories users have built, and the culture of the community. Kang called this "context capital," and presented the "compound interest of context," which grows as contexts are linked to one another, as a core competitive edge.
He added that competitiveness in the AI era ultimately depends on how thickly this context is layered. He said, "The sum of life spent with users cannot be copied by any competitor or any AI," adding, "On top of Artificial Intelligence that anyone can buy and use, we must stack another AI—Accumulated Intelligence—thickly."