Nexon Q2 2026: ARC Raiders Was a Hit, Therefore Everything Is Replicable

Patrick Söderlund already gave us a decent demonstration of executive brainrot during the Battlefield V fiasco. As EA's Chief Design Officer, he responded to criticism by calling some critics “uneducated” and telling anyone who still didn't like the direction of the game to “either accept it or don't buy the game.” EA subsequently reported 7.3 million sales in its launch quarter, roughly one million below expectations. Patrick had left EA by then, but don't buy it then remains an impressively stupid thing for the executive overseeing your games to tell potential customers. Game Developer has the original Söderlund interview, while EA's own FY19 Q3 comments confirm the sales miss.

Eight years later, Patrick is talking again. This time Nexon has given him a much bigger chair.

MapleStory is still carrying the fucking money:

Nexon's Q2 2026 was comfortably profitable and actually beat its own guidance. Revenue reached ¥121.1 billion, roughly £561 million, operating income was ¥31.3 billion, around £145 million, and net income reached ¥29.6 billion, around £137 million. The main driver behind the outperformance was MapleStory, whose franchise revenue jumped 63% year on year to another quarterly record. Korean MapleStory grew another 7% despite the same quarter last year already being up 91%, while MapleStory Worlds jumped 123%. Nexon's Q2 investor presentation lays it all out rather neatly.

Twenty-three years after launch, Nexon's P2W nostalgia casino remains one of its finest inventions. This is also the franchise whose paid Cube system earned Nexon Korea a ₩11.6 billion fine from the Korea Fair Trade Commission after undisclosed probability changes, including desired outcomes being reduced to zero. Somehow the mushroom game continues printing money regardless. Game Developer covered the KFTC decision here.

That record MapleStory performance covered much weaker results elsewhere. Dungeon&Fighter, another of Nexon's supposedly immortal money printers, fell 44% year on year. Nexon actually says this performed as expected, which doesn't make the number any less ugly. Chinese and Korean PC revenue declined, Dungeon&Fighter Mobile was also down year on year, and Nexon expects the franchise decline to continue into Q3. The FC franchise missed its Q2 outlook as well. Nexon expected the World Cup to lift FC Online traffic, somehow failed to extract the expected benefit from the actual fucking World Cup, and its user-acquisition campaign fell short. An April FC Mobile overhaul then introduced technical problems which hurt traffic and monetisation.

Across Nexon's three major established franchises, revenue was actually down 5% year on year. Newer “horizontal” products grew 20%, helped enormously by ARC Raiders. That mixture still produced a good quarter, but the underlying profit picture is less impressive than the 77% net-income headline. Reported revenue grew just 2% and fell 6% at constant currency, while operating income fell 17% reported and 31% at constant currency. Net income benefited from a ¥5.5 billion investment valuation gain and, especially, an FX loss of only ¥1.7 billion compared with ¥17.5 billion a year earlier. Nexon also says lower-than-planned Q2 costs included a non-recurring reversal of share-based compensation, which is useful context when Patrick starts pointing towards flat HR costs as evidence of transformation.

Nobody needs to rescue this company. Nexon finished Q2 with ¥842 billion, roughly £3.9 billion, in cash and is planning a special dividend of around ¥324 billion, roughly £1.5 billion. Patrick has inherited an extremely profitable publisher with a gigantic cash pile and several ancient games that have already spent decades refining the extraction of money from loyal players.

ARC Raiders wins, Patrick gets the company:

ARC Raiders was a phenomenal commercial success. It has sold more than 16.3 million copies, generated over ¥88 billion, roughly £408 million, since launch and contributed ¥18.3 billion, around £85 million, to Q2 alone. Nexon is understandably delighted with it. CEO Junghun Lee described its Q2 performance as showing “enduring strength”, and ARC accounted for roughly 15% of the company's entire quarterly revenue. The game also finally gave Nexon a serious Western breakthrough, with 85% of its 2025 revenue coming from North America and Europe.

Nexon's reaction to that success was astonishingly quick. ARC Raiders launched on 30 October 2025. Less than four months later, on 20 February 2026, Nexon created the position of Executive Chairman for Söderlund and gave him broad authority over long-term strategy, creative direction and how Nexon develops games globally. He also remains CEO of Embark. Patrick had already been a Nexon director following its investment in Embark in 2018, but ARC moved him from the board into a newly created company-wide strategic role. Nexon's appointment announcement is here.

By Q2, Nexon's investor deck was literally headed “ARC Raiders' Success Represents a Replicable Strategy” for developing and publishing games in Western markets. The management summary describes Embark's technology and leaner development process as a strategic route for Nexon's global expansion, while Patrick's wider restructuring assigns profit targets to every product and project and redirects resources towards proven franchises.

One enormous hit and, within months, Nexon had promoted its studio boss and started turning the result into corporate doctrine.

ARC Raiders was a hit, therefore everything is replicable.

Patrick has apparently discovered deliberate success:

Patrick's March Capital Markets Briefing contains some perfectly sensible criticism of Nexon. Its portfolio had become too wide, too many projects lacked practical business cases, development costs were climbing, schedules were slipping and Dungeon&Fighter Mobile was going in the wrong direction. He also identified one problem that becomes particularly funny later: “the pop we get from launching new titles doesn't stick.”

His answer is Embark. Patrick explains that the studio started from scratch, questioned traditional workflows, used smaller teams, better tools and some AI, then produced THE FINALS and ARC Raiders with far fewer people and at a fraction of conventional AAA cost. “Our success wasn't an accident, it was deliberate,” he tells investors, before explaining that this thinking is now being spread around Nexon.

That's useful information about production efficiency. It explains how Embark can make expensive-looking games relatively cheaply. Patrick provides very little insight into the rather more important question of why ARC Raiders suddenly convinced more than 16 million people to buy it.

Nexon doesn't give us the data needed to isolate that supposed formula. We don't see detailed retention cohorts across casual and extraction-shooter players, how much acquisition came through friend groups and word of mouth, how discounting affected later sales, how different updates changed retention, or enough revenue detail to separate new-copy sales from the game's increasingly important MTX business.

Instead, Patrick jumps from efficient workflows to successful game to repeatable Western strategy.

There are plenty of more mundane reasons why ARC exploded. Embark was already an experienced studio packed with former DICE talent. The game had striking presentation, enormous mainstream appeal for an extraction shooter and a far more approachable PvPvE loop than much of the genre. It also landed as an almost perfect social novelty bomb. People bought it, dragged their friends in, discovered the extraction loop together, fought enormous machines, got robbed by strangers and generated endless stories worth sharing.

The novelty part matters because casual players eventually reach the less exciting question: how many more hundreds of hours do I actually want to spend extracting more stuff?

Patrick barely engages with that side of the success. In March he was still telling investors ARC was early, growing and had a future larger than what had already happened. In the very same presentation he admits you cannot simply stamp Embark's playbook onto Nexon because a small new-IP team and hundreds of developers maintaining a 20-year franchise operate completely differently. His transferable revelation eventually comes down to better tools, smarter workflows and less wasted work.

Cheers Patrick. Work efficiently. Nobody had considered that one.

ARC Raiders is already testing the theory:

The public Steam trajectory is rather less triumphant than Nexon's presentation.

ARC Raiders averaged roughly 241,000 concurrent Steam players in January, followed by 171,000 in February, 112,000 in March, 76,000 in April, 61,000 in May, 36,000 in June and 29,000 in July. The latest 30-day average is now around 26,000. Every month since January has fallen, with June alone dropping another 41%. Steam Charts has the full monthly history.

Steam obviously doesn't contain its console audience, but it does give us the same PC population measured consistently over time. Roughly 89% of January's average Steam concurrency has disappeared. The review trend isn't especially pretty either. ARC's Steam page still shows a healthy 82% positive English lifetime score, while recent reviews have fallen to 50% positive, Mixed. The giant launch was genuinely loved; the people reviewing what ARC is offering now are considerably less enthusiastic.

The sales curve has fallen even faster. Nexon's Q1 report showed 4.6 million additional copies sold during Q1. Q2 added only 800,000, an 83% sequential reduction in additional unit sales. Nexon remains happy because ARC is still generating excellent money, and ¥18.3 billion in a quarter is hardly a failure. The company is nevertheless forecasting further sales normalisation and another sequential revenue decline in Q3.

That distinction is where Patrick's boasting starts causing trouble. ARC Raiders the product has already been an enormous financial win. ARC Raiders the evidence for a repeatable long-term Western live-service formula has much more to prove. Patrick himself identified Nexon's old problem as huge launch pops failing to stick, and his flagship example is now rapidly contracting from one of the biggest multiplayer audiences on the market into something much smaller.

Nexon is preparing Frozen Trail for October as ARC's largest update yet, explicitly intended to re-energise the existing core, bring dormant players back and attract newcomers. Embark has also abandoned its original monthly-update ambition for major additions, moving towards two major updates per year because the changes it wants to make require substantially more development time. PC Gamer has Embark's explanation of the new cadence.

Patrick's answer on the Q2 call was especially revealing. He admitted ARC had sold more than Embark anticipated, said they had studied other games in similar situations which recovered through large updates, and hoped Frozen Trail would work in the same way. That's a perfectly normal live-service response. It just sounds much less like somebody operating a deliberately repeatable success machine than the March speech did. The Q2 earnings-call transcript is here.

THE FINALS already shows the other possible destination:

Embark has another useful data point sitting right beside ARC. THE FINALS peaked at about 242,000 concurrent Steam players and now averages roughly 13,000 over the latest 30 days. Nexon describes it as having stable engagement among a passionate player base more than 30 months after launch, which sounds about right. It has become a sustainable niche live service with a dedicated community. Steam Charts shows that long-term curve here.

That outcome is perfectly respectable. It also makes Patrick's attempt to explain ARC through Embark's production philosophy much weaker. Both games came from the same studio using the same broad philosophy of smaller teams, new technology and efficient pipelines, yet one became a paid 16-million-copy phenomenon while the other settled into a much smaller free-to-play shooter.

ARC clearly hit a combination of product, timing, accessibility and novelty that THE FINALS never reproduced at the same scale. Patrick's own admission that ARC sold beyond Embark's expectations makes the rush to call its success “replicable” even funnier.

The supposedly leaner and faster live-service pipeline is also finding the obvious limit of lean teams: there are fewer people producing content. Embark originally wanted monthly ARC updates, discovered that meaningful progression and system changes couldn't be produced properly on that schedule, and shifted the big stuff to six-month intervals instead. Meanwhile the player average has continued sliding while the studio works on October.

Smaller teams can make fantastic games and greatly reduce the cost of a failed bet. They don't magically make maps, enemies, progression systems, weapons, quests, balancing, anti-cheat work and every other live-service demand appear faster than players consume them.

Patrick nevertheless wants “fewer but bigger, better games”, minimum contribution margins and more resources behind proven franchises across Nexon. That sits rather awkwardly beside the thing that earned him this authority in the first place: a strange new Western IP that became vastly more successful than even its own studio expected. It also sits beside Dungeon&Fighter falling 44% while Nexon's pipeline remains full of Dungeon&Fighter Classic, Dungeon&Fighter: ARAD, Project OVERKILL and other attempts to extend the same proven IP.

Apparently the lesson from one unexpected new-IP explosion is greater confidence in proven things.

And then Blue Archive happened:

The other half of Patrick's programme is profitability. Nexon is assigning profit targets to every product and project, removing low-margin projects and directing resources towards areas expected to produce stronger returns. At the same time, its Mono Lake initiative is supposed to make decades of player behaviour, retention and monetisation data usable throughout development and live operations.

Then Blue Archive provided an almost immediate demonstration of how aggressively optimising an established community can go wrong.

Its Japanese version previously gave one Recruitment Point per pull, with 200 points exchangeable for one of the characters currently on rate-up. Nexon Games and Yostar replaced that with a new system guaranteeing a three-star at 100 pulls with a 50% chance of the featured character, then guaranteeing the featured character at 200. The problem is that obtaining a featured character resets the counter immediately. With multiple rate-up characters running together, a lucky pull late in the cycle can wipe the progress that previously could have been completed to 200 and exchanged for another available pickup. Inven Global has a clear breakdown of the changes and Yostar's response.

The community went fucking nuclear. Executive producer Yongha Kim apologised after the backlash and acknowledged damage to player trust, while Blue Archive's recent Steam rating collapsed to Overwhelmingly Negative. Steam currently shows roughly 6,100 recent reviews in that category. A year earlier, shortly after the PC launch, the game was sitting at around 92% positive. Automaton covered Kim's apology, and the current Steam page shows the aftermath.

Patrick doesn't need to have personally designed the gacha change for it to matter here. He is publicly boasting about a company-wide structure built around contribution margins, harder portfolio decisions and the value of Nexon's supposedly priceless long-term player communities. Within months, one of those established communities received a monetisation overhaul developed after long discussions between Yostar and Nexon Games, and the response was an immediate trust implosion.

It's a much better lesson about Nexon's business than anything Patrick has put on a slide. Loyal communities are enormously valuable because people keep coming back and spending money for years. They are also made of people who notice when you fuck with the deal.

The timing makes it especially funny. Patrick became Executive Chairman in February, spent March explaining the new discipline around profitability and long-term communities, and by the end of July Blue Archive was sitting at Overwhelmingly Negative recent reviews because Nexon Games had helped redesign the gacha.

At least the consequences are arriving efficiently.