[Asia Economy Reporter Seungjin Lee] NHN has absorbed its game subsidiary NHN Bigfoot as of the 1st and integrated the game business organization into the headquarters.
On the 4th, NHN announced that it will expand its game business based on its leading capabilities in domestic web board games and extend its competitiveness, which had been focused on Korea and Asia, to a global scale.
NHN is developing its business centered on five core areas: ▲Games ▲Content ▲Technology ▲Payment ▲Commerce. Through this organizational integration, it plans to consolidate game business capabilities at the headquarters and strongly focus on the game business, which is the group's origin.
The keywords for global expansion are the three genres in which NHN has specialized expertise: web board, casual, and mid-core. Based on over 20 years of accumulated unique know-how in managing in-game asset value, NHN aims to target the blockchain game market. In Korea, NHN, and in Japan, its subsidiary NHN PlayArt, which has been steadily performing well, will actively expand their global user base leveraging mobile game development capabilities. Starting in the second half of the year, they plan to target the global market with game lineups such as the Hold'em genre "Double A Poker" and the mid-core genre "Darkest Days."
The newly integrated Game Business Headquarters consists of three business groups including Classic Web Board Business, Mobile Web Board Business, and Casual Business; two production groups including in-house production projects; as well as the Game Technology Center, Game Business Strategy Office, Game Business Office, and Content Production Lab.
The head of the Game Business Headquarters is Kim Sang-ho, the former CEO who led NHN Bigfoot. Kim Sang-ho joined NHN in 2003, overseeing NHN USA and game sourcing and publishing businesses, and has been stably leading NHN's overall game business since becoming CEO of NHN Bigfoot in 2018.
Jung Woo-jin, CEO of NHN, said, "We expect NHN to gain strong growth momentum once again through the integration of the game business headquarters, which has continued since the Hangame era in 1999," adding, "We plan to implement bold strategies to discover new opportunities amid changes in the external environment and the popularization of Web 3.0 in the game industry, and create various synergies among other business sectors such as content, technology, payment, and commerce centered on games."
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