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ARC Raiders Waiting Room (feat. Owen Mahoney)
The people who lead the biggest Western game publishers are no longer in touch with the people who play games. The leadership of major publishers is optimized for financial engineering, not creative breakthrough. Making fun is a second-tier priority. While there’s never been more professionalism in the games industry there’s never been less heart.
– Owen Mahoney, fmr CEO of Nexon (2010-2024)
One of my all-time favorite genres of content is “retiring CEO with no worlds left to conquer gets radically candid about how their industry actually works.”
These takes are often unbelievably insightful, hilarious, and thought-provoking. Unfortunately, it’s pretty rare to hear publicly from highly accomplished execs who aren’t shilling their portfolio or heavily constrained by a board, shareholders, etc. from spilling the tea.
Enter Owen Mahoney!
Owen was the CEO of Nexon for 15 years before wrapping up his tenure in 2024. While he’s still on the boards of Hasbro and Logitech, earlier this year he started dropping essays with “what are you gonna do, fire me?” levels of candor about video game development.
They are… an absolute delight.
Among the topics he’s covered:
A CEO’s internal checklist for game pitches (and the waterfall considerations, such as: will the developer pitching me quit if I don’t green light this?)
The mental model used at Nexon to allocate resources and map the games industry (according to this model Roblox is operating in a different industry from CDPR)
Incinerating the modern Western AAA gamedev meta with passion you’d expect from a popular YouTuber rather than the CEO of a publicly-traded game company (which I suspect he would say is part of the problem!)
If you have any interest in the business of tech or video games, Owen is a golden follow.
OK, let’s move on to post-apocalyptic looting!
ARC RAIDERS: BETA OR SHADOW DROP INCOMING?
One of two things is going to happen during Summer Game Fest this week:
ARC Raiders is going to release in some form, triggering an avalanche of joy
ARC Raiders is not going to release, triggering an avalanche of disappointment
I’m sure fans will respond with reasonable restraint either way!
ARC Raiders, the highly anticipated debut extraction shooter from Embark Studios, is currently #8 in Steam wishlists and drowning in rave reviews from tastemakers like Tomographic, Shroud, and JackFrags.
Most importantly, it is incredibly fun to play.
Extraction shooters are a notoriously inaccessible and sweaty genre, but Embark has found a magical product equilibrium across time-to-kill, incentives for collaboration vs. gunning down players on sight, NPC AI, public comms, etc.
The result? Consistent fun and cinematic runs (watch from 40:28!!)
It’s all good vibes for ARC Raiders heading into Summer Games Fest.
Patrick Söderlund, Embark’s CEO, has been vocal over the years about how Western game development needs a drastic overhaul. It’s got to be a remarkable feeling for a studio co-founded by industry veterans disillusioned with the old way of developing and publishing games to see how fans have embraced their vision coming to life.
If that ethos sounds familiar by the way, that’s not a coincidence: Nexon acquired a majority stake in Embark back 2019. The CEO who oversaw that transaction?
Owen Mahoney.