Kim Chang-han, CEO of Krafton, announced plans to invest more than 200 billion won in external game studios this year.
According to foreign media including Bloomberg on the 14th, Kim explained this portfolio expansion strategy in an interview at CES 2025, the world's largest electronics and IT exhibition held in Las Vegas, USA.
Kim said, "Over the past two years, Krafton has spent $680 million (approximately 950 billion won) acquiring or investing in game studios and startups worldwide, including in the United States and Japan," adding, "We reviewed more than 1,000 studios during this process."
Krafton currently owns a total of 14 domestic and international development subsidiaries as independent studios, including PUBG Studio, the developer and operator of the 'Battlegrounds' series, AI game developer Relu Games, and the recently established inZOI Studio.
At this year's CES, Krafton attracted attention by unveiling 'CPC' (Co-Playable Character), an AI character based on a small language model (SLM) jointly developed with NVIDIA. Unlike traditional game characters that could only perform pre-programmed actions, CPC can interact with people using natural language and can directly perceive situations and respond flexibly.
Kim stated, "We are reviewing ways to enable users without high-performance graphics cards (GPUs) to smoothly use these features."
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