Part IThe Story
Under the Heat Lamp
The caption reaches him by the fifth word. Reporters rain questions on Kim Jung-ju, center, CEO of NXC Corporation, on Wednesday as the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office summoned him as a suspect. The photograph ran in the Korea JoongAng Daily on July 13, 2016, under a two-word headline, "Under the heat lamp," a phrase someone at the paper must have enjoyed writing. It described the light, and it also described the position of a man who had spent twenty-two years arranging not to stand in it.
That was the strange part. By the summer of 2016 Kim Jung-ju was one of the richest people in South Korea and probably the most consequential figure the country's game industry had produced. He had founded Nexon on December 26, 1994, in Seoul, while working toward a doctorate at KAIST. He had overseen the release of what the company billed as the world's first graphical massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Nexon was where MapleStory and KartRider and Dungeon & Fighter came from, and also, depending on whom you asked, where the modern free-to-play economy came from. Yet he had held the title of Nexon chief executive for less than one year, from 2005 into 2006. He moved the company's headquarters to Tokyo. He listed it there. He kept his control in an unlisted holding company whose registered home was on Jeju Island, off the peninsula's southern coast. Korea's rich lists were dominated by second- and third-generation chaebol families whose patriarchs' faces were on everything. His face was mostly on nothing.
Now he was center.
The facts that put him there were small next to the fortune they threatened, which made them worse. In 2005, Nexon, then unlisted, had sold shares to a handful of buyers. One was Jin Kyung-joon, a prosecutor who had been Kim's classmate in Seoul National University's class of 1986 and whose family was close to his. Prosecutors alleged that Kim had arranged for the company to lend Jin around 400 million won to buy 8,537 shares. The figure varies slightly by account: 420 million won in one telling, 425 million in another. Nexon later acknowledged lending Jin and other buyers money, interest-free, because, it said, it wanted the deal closed quickly, and the buyers had repaid promptly. The shares followed the company's own path offshore. They were converted into stock of the Japanese parent, which went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in December 2011, and Jin eventually sold out for a gain the JoongAng Daily put at 12.6 billion won, about $11 million. The money surfaced in March 2016, in the mandatory asset disclosure filed by high-ranking officials. Jin first said he had bought the shares with his own money. Then he said the money came from his mother-in-law.
There is a detail about Jin that no novelist would get away with. When the scandal broke he was the chief of the Korea Immigration Service. He resigned in April. On June 23, 2016, the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office announced that it had banned Kim Jung-ju from leaving the country.
The man whose whole architecture rested on the ability to be elsewhere, with the company in Tokyo, the holding company on Jeju, and his own life increasingly divided between Korea and the United States, had been grounded. His old friend, the official in charge of who got to come and go, was the reason.
Everything in Kim's life after that summer can be read as a reply to the heat lamp, and a good deal of what came before it reads, in hindsight, as an elaborate effort to avoid one. The vow about his children, the hospitals, the attempted sale of the whole empire, the retreat from every title he held: all of it belongs to the reply. The piece of his life that remains hardest to see clearly is the last one. In March 2022, his holding company told the public that he had died in Hawaii at fifty-four, that he had been receiving treatment for depression, and that his condition "seemed to have worsened recently." The family asked for privacy. The cause was not disclosed.
By the Numbers
The Nexon Founder
$10.7BEstimated net worth at death in February 2022, then third-richest in South Korea
850M+Registered players of Dungeon & Fighter, a Nexon franchise with more than $20B in lifetime revenue
<1 yearTime Kim served as Nexon's own CEO (2005–2006)
98.64%Share of holding company NXC that Kim, his wife, and his private company put up for sale in 2019
₩2.8TNexon's sales in 2021, his last full year (about $2.3B)
₩100BPersonal donation Kim pledged in May 2018 for children's hospitals and young founders (about $93M)
A Common Name
Look him up and the first thing the encyclopedia does is apologize for him. For other people named Kim Jeong-ju, see Kim Jeong-ju (disambiguation). The disambiguation page lists a North Korean politician born in 1903, a boxer born in 1981, a footballer born in 1991, and the founder of Nexon. Kim is the most common surname in Korea, and the name was never going to belong to him alone.
The confusion goes further than that. One machine-assembled encyclopedia, stitching his biography together from the internet, gives him an amateur boxing career, including a welterweight gold medal at the 2002 Asian Games in Busan. In January 1998, at the bottom of the Asian financial crisis, the New York Times ran a photograph of a man named Kim Jung Ju standing with a seamstress in his Seoul garment factory. He had just laid off a third of his 130 employees. Under the old Korean-style capitalism, he told the paper, other companies would have helped him, "but now the bottom line is everything." That was a different man. In the same months, the other Kim Jung-ju was running a four-year-old software company that had shipped a graphical online fantasy world to a country whose broadband buildout was only beginning. One Kim was a casualty of the old economy and the other was building the new one. They had the same name.
The real Kim was born in Seoul on February 22, 1968. Korean biographical sources place the family comfortably inside the capital's educated professional class: a lawyer father, according to several accounts, and a mother who had studied piano. One Korean blog, writing the day he died, titled its post with the phrase "grew up in a chaebol-like environment." This matters because the most repeated sentence about Kim in the business press was that he was self-made. "Korea's top 100 rich list is dominated by chaebol families," The Investor wrote in 2017, "but there is one self-made man." An American columnist who met him in 2002 called his rise a "scratch-to-riches story." Both descriptions are true in the way that matters to a rich list. He inherited no company. They are also slightly false in the way that matters to a biography, because he did not start from scratch either. He started from Gwangseong High School, Seoul National University's computer engineering department, and KAIST, which was close to the most privileged starting position the Korean meritocracy offered a young man in the late 1980s.
He also started, crucially, from Japan. Korean biographical records list a completed course in international studies at Sophia University in Tokyo, taken while he was an undergraduate. Japan in that decade was the empire of the home console. It was the country that had taught the world what a video game could be, and later accounts trace his interest in the Japanese game industry to that stay. He came home with an outsider's knowledge of the dominant power, which turned out to be a business asset. Twenty years later he would take his company to Tokyo and list it there, and the JoongAng Daily would credit him with "laying the foundation" for Korea's PC game makers to compete in a field "dominated by Japanese companies."
During his freshman year at Seoul National University, he met Yoo Jung-hyun. She would become his wife and, from the day Nexon was founded, a working part of it: she directed the headquarters' management support team, later served as an auditor and director of NXC, and by 2019 held 29.43 percent of the holding company. "Not much information has been revealed about Yoo even within the company," The Investor noted, "and thus, she is known to have a more secluded type of authority than her husband." It is hard to read that as anything but an understatement. As of his death, according to Korean press accounts, no photograph of her had ever been released to the media. If Kim was the founder who avoided the camera, his co-owner had avoided it entirely.
The class of 1986 at Seoul National University produced Kim, and it also produced Jin Kyung-joon. Jin went into law the way talented SNU graduates of that era went into law, through the examinations and into the prosecution service, the institution most feared by everyone who made money in Korea. Kim went into code. Jin's career took him to the Ministry of Justice and the Supreme Prosecutors' Office, and finally to the head of immigration. They stayed close and their families stayed close. That kind of friendship, formed young in an elite school, is one of the most valuable things a person in Korea can have, and it can also be one of the most dangerous.
The Kingdom That Never Closed
Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds launched in 1996, and the most remarkable fact about it is a single clause in Nexon's corporate history: it is a game "which the company continues to service." The servers have been on for close to three decades. More than 26 million players have registered. In July 2020, a mobile adaptation called The Kingdom of the Winds: Yeon became the top-grossing title on Apple's App Store in South Korea, twenty-four years after the original. On October 30, 2024, Nexon announced a full sequel.
Most entertainment businesses sell an object, such as a cartridge, a disc, or a ticket. The transaction ends and the next one has to be won from scratch. What Kim had built in 1996, in a country that did not yet have a mature home-console culture, was a place. The meaningful unit was the hours people spent there over years, sometimes over a lifetime, not the copy sold. You didn't finish Nexus. You lived in it.
From that idea the economics Kim became famous for followed almost inevitably, though it took the industry years to see it. If the product is a place, you can let people in for free. What you charge for is how they appear there, how quickly they progress, the sword, the hat, the costume. Kim's company is widely credited with pioneering the freemium model in online games, and Bloomberg's obituary went further, crediting him with pioneering "loot boxes," the randomized digital packages players buy without knowing exactly what is inside. The technique spread through Asia and then through the West. It became the default economics of mobile gaming and a large share of PC and console gaming besides.
Nexon's franchise table from August 2022, the last before his death fully passed into the company's history, reads like a census of small countries. Dungeon & Fighter, launched in 2005, had more than 850 million registered players and more than $20 billion in lifetime revenue. KartRider, launched in 2004, had more than 380 million players and more than $1 billion. MapleStory, launched in 2003, had more than 180 million players and more than $3 billion. Dungeon & Fighter became one of the most popular free-to-play PC games in China, and that one market, more than any other single thing, turned Kim from a successful Korean founder into a billionaire. By 2012, Forbes counted him among the wealthiest people in Korea.
The freemium model has a tension built into it, and Nexon embodied it fully. Letting people in for free is generous. Selling them chances at things they want, without telling them the chances, is something else. In 2018 the Korea Fair Trade Commission fined Nexon 939 million won for giving players false probability information about randomized items in Sudden Attack. Nexon Korea argued that the phrase "random provision" had only meant that the odds of each item differed, not that they were equal. Most of the reckoning over MapleStory came after Kim's death. The regulator found that for roughly a decade Nexon had lowered the odds of obtaining certain equipment from "Cubes" bought with real money, in some cases to zero. In 2024 it imposed a record 11.6 billion won fine. A single player named Kim sued and won in the Supreme Court, which ordered Nexon to refund five percent of what he had spent, and Nexon agreed to compensate some 800,000 affected users with about 21.9 billion won in in-game currency.
None of this appears in the obituaries as anything other than a footnote. It belongs in the profile anyway, because the Cube was in its way the purest expression of what Kim had built: a free world whose economy was invisible to the people who lived in it, and whose rules were known only to the people who ran it.
Buying Back the People Who Left
The man who led Wizet was named Seung-chan Lee, and before Wizet he had been the lead developer on a Nexon game called QuizQuiz. He left. In April 2001 he set up his own studio in Seoul, which was what ambitious Korean developers of that generation did. The money was in owning the thing, and the young industry was full of people who had learned the trade inside one company and wanted to try it in their own. In April 2003, Wizet released a cheerful, side-scrolling, almost childlike online world called MapleStory. According to the company's own long-defunct website, it soon reached 100,000 concurrent users and two million registered accounts. Later that year Wizet launched it in Japan, with similar results.
In 2004, Nexon bought Wizet.
The pattern repeated. Nexon's most profitable franchise, Dungeon & Fighter, was built by Neople, an outside studio, and came under the Nexon umbrella; the studio's location today is listed as Jeju City, near the holding company. Mabinogi came from devCAT, an internal group. Kim's skill was rarely the act of creation itself, and the people who worked with him seem to have understood that better than his admirers did. His skill was recognition, a sense of which world was going to hold its people, followed by the willingness to pay for it, including when the builder was someone who had walked out of his own building a few years earlier.
The Investor would later call him "the master of investment" and observe that he had "enlarged Nexon through merge and acquisition strategies." The American writer who had met him in 2002 when the company was worth, by his estimate, about $200 million put the same observation less politely a decade later: "Jay Kim's detractors call him a boorish, selfish person who discards his former game developers and partners like so many used-up prepaid cards." He noted that in a culture "where upholding personal loyalties and relationships are considered de rigueur signs of good manners, his personal style is often frowned upon." He then added, with what reads like admiration: "I don't think that Jay Kim much thinks what others care about him."
Both portraits can be right at once. A man can be unsentimental about developers, studios, and franchises, things that can be bought, merged, shut down, and spun off (some older Nexon titles ended up maintained by a spinoff called Kru Interactive), and badly sentimental about something else. In Kim's case the something else, it would turn out, was old friends.
Nexon's catalog, in any case, documents the unsentimental half. The list of titles from 2014 onward reads in places like a list of headstones: Monster Squad, servers closed December 2016; Titanfall Online, "never fully released"; LawBreakers, the debut title from Cliff Bleszinski's new studio, servers closed in late 2018; Durango: Wild Lands, closed October 16, 2019. Opening worlds and closing them was the business.
The Patience of Tokyo
In 2002, when the columnist first met him, Kim was asked when Nexon might go public. "10–20 years," he said. Asked why not sooner, he shrugged and said he just wanted the company to build good games.
It is worth stopping on how strange that answer was. Kim had built Nexon without venture capital. When the New York firm Collaborative Fund brought him on as a partner in 2014, its founder, Craig Shapiro, introduced him specifically as an expert in "bootstrapping," a man who had built a multibillion-dollar business without taking a single venture round. Shapiro was a young American investor whose whole fund, its second, totaled $33 million, a rounding error on his new partner's net worth. That he recruited Kim anyway says something about what Kim represented: proof that the slow path existed. A Wall Street Journal piece that spring summarized Kim's advice to startups in its headline: raise capital carefully, not because you can.
The patience did not survive success, which is usually how patience ends. As Nexon's games took off, particularly in China, its employees pushed hard for a listing, eager to cash in on their work. Disney approached. Electronic Arts approached. Nexon and both suitors, in the columnist's phrase, "did multi-year dances" around a buyout. Kim declined to be bought and eventually decided to list on his own terms, partly to stay competitive globally and partly, the columnist heard, out of a desire "to relieve some of the burden off of his own shoulders by professionalizing ownership of the company."
Where he listed was the real decision. Nexon had moved its headquarters from Seoul to Tokyo in 2005, the same year Kim briefly took the CEO title. The Seoul office was where everything was actually built, and the Tokyo listing was the new address made official. On December 14, 2011, Nexon went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in the largest initial public offering in Japan that year and the second largest by a technology company anywhere, raising more than $1 billion. The reasoning, according to people who followed it, was to tap Japan's large and stable retail investor base. Japan had also led the game industry when Kim was a student there. The company quadrupled in value after listing.
Seoul was not where the arrangement ended. Above the Tokyo-listed Nexon sat NXC, which owned roughly 60 percent of it. Above NXC sat Kim, his wife, and a private company called Wisekids. NXC was unlisted and registered on Jeju Island. In the Dong-A Ilbo's 2016 description, the holding company was "more than 90 percent owned by affiliate persons such as his wife," and "relations with Nexon Japan make its ownership structure all too opaque." A civic group later went further and accused NXC of setting up what it called a paper headquarters on Jeju to cut taxes on gains from Nexon Japan shares. It put the evaded corporate taxes in the hundreds of billions of won. These were accusations, and nothing in the record shows they became anything more. They still show how the arrangement looked from outside. A Korean company was listed in Japan and owned from an island by a couple who were almost never seen.
This was not the chaebol model, in which a family controls a vast industrial group through cross-shareholdings and the founder's grandson eventually takes the chairman's seat. It was not the Silicon Valley model either, with venture rounds and option pools and a founder who is the product's public face. It was something odder, a structure designed above all to make Nexon hard to locate. The company was Korean by birth, Japanese by listing, island-based by ownership, and increasingly global by revenue.
The Dong-A's editorial board, writing during the scandal, put the cost of the arrangement in one sentence: "Only Kim along with a very few people in the management have the knowledge of how the company is run."
Thirty Cases and a Friend
The Dong-A Ilbo's count was striking. Over the years, it reported in July 2016, Kim had been the subject of more than thirty prosecution cases and had been cleared of most of them. In 2002 there was an accusation of embezzling research funds and breach of duty, and the paper reported that the office that cleared him then was Jin's. In 2006 there was an investigation into a gaming program in which Nexon had invested; it did not reach Nexon. In 2010 shareholders sued after the takeover of a company called N-Doors. In 2011 MapleStory member data leaked and he was again investigated, and again cleared. "During this period," the paper noted, "senior prosecutor Jin worked for Ministry of Justice and Supreme Prosecutor's Office." The editorial went on: "The prosecution must delve into the reasons Kim maintained close relationship with Jin." No court ever found that Jin had protected Kim. The Dong-A was implying it, and the implication was hard to forget.
Kim's own account kept moving, which did not help. In the Dong-A's chronology, he said in March that he knew nothing because it was "a personal transaction." In June, he said he had "lent some money and was paid back." By July: "I gave it for free without anything in return." The paper compared him to "other vicious enterprisers who make excuses behind the company." For a man whose public reputation rested largely on being a different kind of businessman, the comparison was cruel and probably intended to be.
Prosecutors indicted him without detention. Jin went to trial accused of receiving some 900 million won in benefits, which, as The Investor tallied them, included money for the Nexon shares, a Genesis car, and overseas trips Jin took with his family and acquaintances. The specific allegation against Kim on the trips was about 50 million won. The trial stretched through the second half of 2016. In the same year Nexon's much-promoted shooter Sudden Attack 2 failed so badly that its Korean servers closed shortly after launch, and Kim resigned from Nexon's board of directors and issued a public apology.
On December 13, 2016, the first trial court found Kim not guilty, ruling that the shares and travel money Jin received were not bribes because no link to specific business favors had been proven. Prosecutors appealed. In May 2018, the Seoul High Court cleared him again.
The JoongAng Daily obituary would call him "iconoclastic." The Korea Herald's headline in the middle of the scandal was "From classy to notorious." What the record actually shows is that a man who was exacting about business, who closed studios, sold assets, and declined the overtures of Disney and EA, was apparently careless about the one relationship that could hurt him most. The kindest reading, consistent with everything his friends said after his death, is that he did not think of Jin as a contact. He thought of him as a friend from 1986, someone he would have given the money to whatever Jin's job was. The harshest reading is the Dong-A's. Under Korean law, the courts decided which reading counted, and they chose the first.
The Korea Times, citing people close to him, later described what the trials did to him. He "suffered exhaustion while undergoing two years of prosecution investigation." He "has become tired."
Bricks, Chairs, Coins
In the middle of all this, his investments kept expanding in ways the market found puzzling. In a June 2014 interview with the JoongAng Ilbo at Nexon's offices in Pangyo Techno Valley, south of Seoul, a reporter put the question bluntly: most of the companies he had invested in, BrickLink, Stokke, and Lit Motors, "have become an issue. Why is this?" Kim answered that there were distinctive startups in the eastern United States, and said he had been watching startups in Europe, the U.S., and Korea for years. In the same interview he complained, as he often did, that Korean society was too constrained and that it would need to open up if it wanted to keep growing economically.
The portfolio looked like an index of his private interests. He was, by every account, an avid Lego fan. In 2013 his holding company bought BrickLink, the online marketplace where adult Lego enthusiasts traded individual bricks and retired sets. In December 2013, through NXC's investment arm NXMH, he struck a deal for Stokke, the Norwegian maker of the Tripp Trapp, a famous wooden high chair that grows with the child. His daughters were born in 2002 and 2004. In 2018 Stokke added JetKids, a children's travel brand. In September 2017, NXC paid about $80 million for 65 percent of Korbit, South Korea's first cryptocurrency exchange. In 2018 NXMH bought Bitstamp, one of the oldest exchanges in Europe. There were also angel investments in a Belgian startup called Jeff, in WeMap, in SendBird, in OnDemandKorea, and in SmartStudy, the Korean company behind the children's song "Baby Shark."
It is easy to make fun of a games billionaire buying high chairs and Bitcoin exchanges, and plenty of commentators did. The crypto bets, at least, have a wry footnote. Years before NXC bought Korbit, according to a friend's recollection after his death, Kim told her to get out of Bitcoin when it was trading at $250. "Not all of his advice was great," she wrote.
There is also a more sympathetic reading of the portfolio. BrickLink, the Tripp Trapp, and Korbit have something in common with Nexus and MapleStory. Each is less an object than a medium for a community that persists over time. BrickLink was a city of collectors. The Tripp Trapp was sold on the promise that one chair would last a child's whole childhood. A crypto exchange is a marketplace whose users' trust has to be earned again every day. Kim seems to have liked things that lasted. In November 2019 he sold BrickLink to the Lego Group itself, the toy company buying back the community its most devoted customers had built around it, which amounted to a version of what he had done with Wizet in 2004. The Korean press described the sale as "streamlining" after "a botched gaming deal." The botched deal was the sale of the empire.
What Cannot Be Inherited
In September 2017, the Korean government formally designated Nexon a conglomerate. With more than 5 trillion won in assets, it was now subject to the stricter rules the state applied to big business groups, which, in Korea, means rules written with the chaebol in mind. Kim read about it while he was still on trial.
"This made me look back at my life," he said, "at the small company I started with my friends back in 1994."
On May 29, 2018, a few weeks after the Seoul High Court cleared him, he released a statement that remains the most quoted thing he ever said publicly.
— Kim Jung-ju, statement of May 29, 2018I won't be passing down Nexon to my kids.
It is worth reading the vow against the country it was spoken in. The groups on the Fair Trade Commission's list above Nexon (Samsung, SK, Hyundai, LG, Lotte, and dozens more) are, with few exceptions, family dynasties. Succession is the central drama of Korean capitalism, played out in courts, in shareholder meetings, and on the front pages. A founder announcing that his company would go to "seasoned managers" rather than to his daughters, who were then still under twenty, was not just saying something unusual. He was rejecting the most important rule of the system that had just reclassified him.
He framed it as a promise he had always intended. "I have planned to do so since I founded Nexon in 1994," he said. "Nexon could grow into a large company with passion of our employees and horizontal corporate culture. I think the culture should be maintained for the company's continuous innovation and healthier growth."
A reporter could add a few complications. Horizontal or not, Nexon got its first labor union in October 2018, five months later, the first in the Korean game industry. The Dong-A had called the group "a one-person management system" two years earlier. The vow concerned management, not ownership: the shares remained with the family, and NXC remained owned by Kim, his wife, and Wisekids. A billionaire who promises his children won't run the company while keeping the stake that controls whoever does has not exactly renounced a dynasty.
Then, seven months later, he tried to renounce the whole thing.
On January 3, 2019, the Korea Economic Daily reported that Kim had put NXC up for sale, including his 67.49 percent, his wife's 29.43 percent, and Wisekids' 1.72 percent, a combined 98.64 percent. He had reportedly hired Deutsche Securities and Morgan Stanley to run the process. Analysts valued the holding company at more than 10 trillion won, about $8.9 billion, which would have made it the largest M&A deal in Korean history. Tencent, which distributed Dungeon & Fighter in China, was mentioned as a possible buyer. The Korea Times explained the decision partly by the weather: tightening regulation, a stalled Chinese market, politicians pushing to classify games alongside gambling as the World Health Organization moved to recognize gaming disorder as a disease. Then it quoted a source on the founder's mood: "Kim has expressed his intention to people surrounding him that he may need to end the game business as he has become tired of regulations and the negative perception on games in addition to the prosecution investigation and trials he underwent."
On July 8, 2019, Reuters reported that he had abandoned what it called a potential $16 billion deal. The industry explanation was that no buyer could digest something that large.
He was fifty-one. He had promised not to give the company to his children and then failed to sell it to anyone else. It remained his, along with all the ambivalence that came with it.
The Class of the First Generation
Kim's death was mourned in Korea partly as the end of a generation. Graduates of Seoul National University and KAIST fill the ranks of the country's first tech founders, the people who built consumer internet companies in a country whose economy had been organized around shipyards, steel, and electronics conglomerates. The JoongAng Daily's obituary named three of them. Lee Hae-jin founded Naver, which became the Korean search engine that Google never displaced. Kakao founder Kim Beom-su built the messenger that runs on nearly every phone in the country. NCSoft founder and chief executive Kim Taek-jin built Nexon's great domestic rival, one of the "three N's" of Korean gaming along with Nexon and Netmarble.
Their stories rhyme with his more than they differ. Each was a technically trained graduate of the same few institutions. Each built something that was not a chaebol and over time became big enough to be regulated as one: Kakao and Naver, like Nexon, now appear on the Fair Trade Commission's list of large business groups. Each eventually faced the problem Kim stated in 2018, which was what a "small company I started with my friends" becomes when it is no longer small, and when the friends have become officials, or rivals, or defendants.
They also cooperated, and that tends to drop out of the rivalry stories. Kim was a founding board member of C-Program, a venture philanthropy fund established jointly by the founders of Nexon, Naver, Kakao, Daum, and NCSoft. When he died, Kim Taek-jin, head of the rival company, posted on Facebook. The obituary quoted the opening words, "My beloved friend," and then the excerpt ended.
There is another generation in Kim's story, later and quieter: the managers to whom he promised the company. One of them, Lee Jung-hun, was a Nexon Korea vice president in November 2016, in the middle of the scandal, when he stood up at a press conference before the G-Star game show and explained why Nexon was about to exhibit thirty-five new titles, the most in its history, across a record 400 booths, months after the Sudden Attack 2 disaster. "Nexon does not have a specific principle in choosing which computer online game to publish," he said. "We are concentrating on diversity." A colleague, Chung Sang-won, added that the market failure of a less profitable game "does not mean that it was useless to develop such a game." It was a strange thing for a company to say about itself in its worst year, and it sounded like the founder: the willingness to keep opening worlds and accept that most would close.
In late 2023, Nexon announced that Owen Mahoney, the chief executive who had run the Tokyo-listed company through Kim's final years, would be succeeded in 2024 by the head of Nexon Korea, whom the English-language press called Junghun Lee. It was the same man. The founder's promise of professional managers had been kept by someone who had defended the founder's oddest instinct in public.
A Hospital, a Library, a Museum
"During the first trial," Kim said in May 2018, "I promised to pay off my debt to society, regardless of the ruling on my charge."
He chose an exact word, debt, and the philanthropy that followed was shaped like a repayment plan. In 2016, NXC, Nexon, and Neople contributed more than $18 million to build the Purme Foundation Nexon Children's Rehabilitation Hospital in Mapo-gu, western Seoul. It was the country's first pediatric rehabilitation hospital. The Nexon Foundation opened in February 2018. The pledge of 100 billion won in personal money, about $93 million, for children's hospitals and young entrepreneurs came that May. In February 2019 the foundation committed $9 million to a second rehabilitation hospital in Daejeon, which would be Korea's first public children's rehabilitation hospital. In October 2020 it committed 10 billion won to Seoul National University Hospital, the hospital of his alma mater, for the Nexon Children's Palliative Care Center. In total, the JoongAng Daily reported, the foundation gave 50 billion won toward children's hospitals. In 2021, Forbes named him to its list of Asia's Heroes of Philanthropy.
There was more, and almost all of it was for children. The Nexon Small Library project built 130 small public libraries in underserved communities. The Nexon Youth Programming Challenge was an annual coding competition. SOHO Impact, a U.S. nonprofit he founded with the foundation, promoted creative brick play, and a 2018 program with the Los Angeles Unified School District was announced as reaching more than 75,000 children. The bricks again.
The earliest of these projects, though, was built for the past, not for children. In July 2013, on Jeju Island, where his holding company was registered, Kim opened the Nexon Computer Museum, which was billed as Asia's first. He had spent about ten years collecting machines and game artifacts for it. It is the institution in his story that is easiest to overlook and maybe the one that explains him best. He came of age with the personal computer, built his fortune on the networked one, and then quietly paid to preserve the hardware that was otherwise headed for landfills: the beige towers, the dead consoles, the machines that ran the first generation of online worlds.
He went back to school as well. He earned an MFA in arts management from the Korea National University of Arts, and his thesis, according to Korean records, was on art participation programs at Nexon. In 2011, the year of the Tokyo IPO, he taught as an adjunct professor at KAIST, the school where he had left a doctorate unfinished to start the company. For a billionaire known as a deal-maker, that is an unusual way to spend his time.
Just Wait
In July 2021, Kim stepped down as chief executive of NXC after sixteen years and handed the post to an executive named Lee Jae-kyo. He had now given up every title he had ever held at the company he founded. The managers he had promised were in charge. The heat lamp was five years in the past.
He died at the end of February 2022, while traveling in Hawaii. He was fifty-four. NXC made the announcement on March 1, a Tuesday, in a short statement that seemed to have been drafted in pain: "Please excuse us that we cannot explain in detail as all of his family members are devastated. The deceased had been receiving treatment for depression, and we are sad that it seemed to have worsened recently." His wife flew to the United States. The cause of death was not made public, and nothing written here should be taken to supply it.
— Owen Mahoney, Nexon CEO, March 2022As a founder and visionary leader, Jay encouraged those around him to ignore the skeptics and trust their creative instincts. He will be deeply missed by his Nexon family and many friends.
The most revealing tribute came from someone with no institutional reason to write one. A woman named Leah, who had known him for about a decade, posted on LinkedIn the week he died. "He always told me I should write about him," she began, "so here it goes." Eleven days earlier she had written to tell him she was snowboarding in Park City, "a place and sport we both love," and that she had just landed her first job as a software engineer. Years before, at a low point in her own life, she had asked him about his darkest period, and she wrote down what he told her.
— Kim Jung-ju, as recalled by his friend Leah D., March 2022Think of where you were 5 years ago, 11 years ago. Think of how much has changed. If you're not happy now, just wait. It'll change.
He told her she was a good person when she did not believe it herself. He told her, "You must only be doing the good things for the good people." He told her, "People are pretty much the same no matter who they are or what their status is — no matter how much money they have." He was the third-richest person in his country when he died, and he said this to a friend he had met when she was not doing well.
"I'm happy I met him," she wrote, "and I'm sad it's over."
Things kept happening after him, as he had said they would. In May 2022, Nexon announced a new sub-brand called Mintrocket, devoted to games "focusing on the essence of fun." Its first title, Dave the Diver, a small, odd game about a man who runs a sushi restaurant and dives a strange sea at night, sold a million copies in ten days. It looked like the kind of game Chung Sang-won had defended in 2016, one with no obvious business model that turned out to have one. Lee Jung-hun became chief executive. The regulators finished their work on the Cubes. The Daejeon hospital and the palliative care center at his alma mater opened their doors to the children they were built for.
And in Nexon's game catalog, at the top of the list, dated 1996, sits the first world, the one that has never closed. Its servers are still on, and its players log in under names that also belong to many other people. Somewhere in its old graphics, players are walking across a kingdom he paid for when he was twenty-eight and had left a doctorate unfinished.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is an attempt to turn Kim Jung-ju's decisions into usable principles. The record is contradictory. Some of his methods made him one of the most successful founders of his generation, some nearly ruined him, and several did both. The principles below are drawn from what he actually did, including the parts that went wrong, which are often the most instructive.
The principles
- 1.Sell the world for free; charge for the self.
- 2.Disclose the odds before someone else does.
- 3.Buy back the people who left.
- 4.Bootstrap until growth is a choice.
- 5.List where the capital matches your clock.
- 6.Opacity is a loan against your future credibility.
- 7.Audit proximity, not just transactions.
- 8.Decide early what cannot be inherited.
- 9.Fund breadth and accept the graveyard.
- 10.Let obsessions become theses, and know their exit.
- 11.Name the debt and repay it in institutions.
- 12.Keep the first world running.
N
The Arc of a Founder
Key decisions in Kim Jung-ju's life, drawn from the source record.
1986
Enters Seoul National University computer engineering; meets Yoo Jung-hyun; classmate Jin Kyung-joon in the same entering class.
1994
Founds Nexon in Seoul on December 26 while pursuing a KAIST doctorate.
1996
Launches Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds; it is still being serviced decades later.
2004
Acquires Wizet, the studio founded by a former Nexon developer, and with it MapleStory.
2005
Moves Nexon headquarters to Tokyo; briefly takes CEO title; Jin buys unlisted shares with a Nexon loan.
2011
Nexon IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange raises more than $1B, Japan's largest that year.
2013
Opens Nexon Computer Museum on Jeju; buys BrickLink; strikes Stokke deal.
2016
Summoned by prosecutors; travel ban; resigns from Nexon board; acquitted at first trial in December.
2018
Cleared on appeal in May; vows Nexon will not pass to his children; pledges ₩100B.
2019
Puts 98.64% of NXC up for sale in January; abandons sale by July; sells BrickLink to Lego.
2021
Steps down as NXC CEO after sixteen years.
2022
Dies in Hawaii at 54 on February 28.
Principle 1
Sell the world for free; charge for the self
Kim's foundational insight was a change in what counts as the product. The product was a persistent place, Nexus from 1996 on, rather than a box on a shelf, and once the product is a place, the entry fee is the wrong thing to charge for. Removing it maximizes the population, and the population is what makes the place worth being in. Revenue moves to identity and progress: how you look, how fast you advance, what you carry. The results are measurable in the franchise table, including more than 850 million registered players and more than $20 billion in lifetime revenue for Dungeon & Fighter alone.
The principle reaches well beyond games. Any business where value comes from other users being present, such as marketplaces, communities, and collaborative tools, faces the same choice: charge at the door and shrink the crowd, or let the crowd in and charge for the ways individuals want to distinguish themselves within it. Kim chose the second path early and committed to it fully.
Tactic: Identify which part of your product grows more valuable as more people use it, make that part free, and put your price on the individual's expression or acceleration within it.
Principle 2
Disclose the odds before someone else does
The weak point of freemium is information asymmetry. Nexon's randomized-item economy depended on players not knowing their exact odds, and that asymmetry eventually became a legal liability: a 939 million won fine in 2018 over Sudden Attack, the regulator's finding that MapleStory Cube odds had been lowered for about a decade and in some cases set to zero, a Supreme Court loss to a single player, compensation to 800,000 users, and a record 11.6 billion won fine in 2024. Most of the bill arrived after the founder was gone.
The lesson is not that randomized monetization is unethical in itself. It is that hidden rules in a business built on trust are debts that grow over time. A regulator, a court, or a determined customer will eventually call them in, and that will happen at a time you did not pick.
Tactic: Publish the rules of any system where customers pay without knowing the outcome, and audit those rules each year as if a regulator will read them, because eventually one will.
Principle 3
Buy back the people who left
Seung-chan Lee led development on QuizQuiz, left to found Wizet in 2001, shipped MapleStory in 2003, and was bought back in 2004. Most companies treat departing talent as a loss to be minimized with retention bonuses and non-competes. Kim treated it as outsourced exploration. The people who left took on the risk of finding out whether their idea worked, and Nexon paid only for the ones that did.
This approach requires a lack of sentiment that his detractors read as cruelty, the "used-up prepaid cards" line. It also requires the opposite: enough goodwill that people who leave are willing to come back. The two coexist uneasily, and Kim seems to have managed it only in part.
Tactic: Keep a running list of former employees who started companies, stay in touch with each one, and treat their startups as your highest-signal acquisition pipeline.
Principle 4
Bootstrap until growth is a choice
Nexon took no venture capital. When Collaborative Fund recruited Kim in 2014, it was specifically as a bootstrapping expert, and his public advice was to raise money carefully, "not because you can." His 2002 prediction of an IPO in "10–20 years" was not modesty. It reflected having no outside clock forcing a timeline on him.
Bootstrapping kept the option of saying no open, and he used it. Disney and Electronic Arts both made sustained approaches and both were turned down. Years later, Nexon was the company rumored to be preparing a bid for EA. Owning his own timeline let Kim turn down buyers until he was in a position to be one.
Tactic: Before any fundraise, write down which future offers you want to be able to refuse, and raise only as much as preserves that ability.
Principle 5
List where the capital matches your clock
Nexon's 2011 listing in Tokyo instead of Seoul, New York, or Hong Kong was a choice of investor base. Japan offered a large, stable retail market and the home of the industry Kim had studied as a student. The company raised more than $1 billion in Japan's biggest IPO that year and went on to quadruple in value.
K
Kim vs. the Korean Default
How Kim's structural choices diverged from the chaebol norm.
| Dimension | Chaebol default | Kim's choice | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Listing venue | Seoul (KOSPI) | Tokyo Stock Exchange, 2011 | Scaled |
| Founder visibility | Patriarch as public face | CEO title for less than one year | Mixed |
| Ownership structure | Cross-shareholdings | Unlisted NXC on Jeju owned by Kim and wife | Risk |
| Succession | Children inherit control | Vowed management to professionals | Executed |
| Outside capital | State-linked bank lending | No venture capital | Scaled |
| Diversification | Industrial adjacency | Lego marketplace, high chairs, crypto exchanges | Exploratory |
The listing location is part of the company's identity, not a technical detail. It determines who your shareholders are, how patient they are, which press covers you, and, as Nexon's case shows, how domestic regulators and the domestic public perceive you.
Tactic: Choose your listing venue by asking which investor base will tolerate your product cycle best, not which exchange carries the most prestige.
Principle 6
Opacity is a loan against your future credibility
The structure that protected Kim, a Tokyo-listed operating company under an unlisted Jeju holding company owned by a couple who rarely appeared in public, gave him control and quiet. In 2016 it was presented back to him as evidence. The Dong-A Ilbo called the structure "all too opaque" and described "a one-person management system" in which "only Kim along with a very few people in the management have the knowledge of how the company is run." Opacity had cost him nothing for twenty years. Then, when a scandal broke, it shaped how every fact was read.
Privacy and opacity are different things. Privacy protects you. Opacity, to an outsider, looks like you are hiding something, and when trouble comes, people assume the worst about what they cannot see.
Tactic: For every structural choice made for control or privacy, write the one-paragraph public explanation now, while nothing is wrong, so the explanation exists before anyone asks.
Principle 7
Audit proximity, not just transactions
The interest-free loan that let Jin Kyung-joon buy 8,537 shares in 2005 was small, and Nexon said it was repaid promptly. The courts found no bribery. It nearly destroyed Kim anyway, because the danger lay in the relationship rather than the amount. A university classmate who became a senior prosecutor, whose family was close to Kim's, and whose office had handled cases involving him made every transaction between them look suspect in hindsight.
The lesson is uncomfortable. Founders build early companies on trust between friends, and that trust is real and valuable. As friends rise into positions of power, though, the same closeness turns into a governance problem. A transaction that would be harmless with a stranger becomes dangerous with an old friend.
Tactic: Keep a written list of personal relationships with people in positions of state power, and require independent sign-off on any financial dealing with anyone on it, no matter how small.
Principle 8
Decide early what cannot be inherited
Kim said he had planned from 1994 not to hand Nexon to his children, and he made it public in May 2018. In the Korean context, that rejected the central rule of the system. He tied the decision to culture: a "horizontal corporate culture," he said, was why Nexon grew, and family succession would end it.
The weakness was in how far he took it. He gave up management but kept ownership, and when he tried to sell the ownership in 2019, he could not complete the deal. A founder who intends to separate the company from the family needs to decide what exactly is being separated, whether management, control, or equity, and plan each one separately, since each comes apart at a different speed.
Tactic: Write a succession memo that separately addresses management, voting control, and economic ownership, and set a date by which each one will be resolved.
Principle 9
Fund breadth and accept the graveyard
In November 2016, during the worst year in the company's history, Nexon brought thirty-five new games to G-Star and its executives said in public that they valued "diversity over sales." Chung Sang-won said a commercial failure "does not mean that it was useless." The catalog includes many closed servers, among them Monster Squad, LawBreakers, Durango: Wild Lands, and Titanfall Online. It also includes Dave the Diver, which sold a million copies in ten days after Kim's death, from a sub-brand built to chase "the essence of fun."
The lesson is about portfolio math in hit-driven businesses. The winners pay for many losers, and you cannot find the winners without paying for the losers. The man who said "we are concentrating on diversity" in 2016 was running the company by 2024.
Tactic: Set a fixed share of development budget for projects with no obvious business model, and judge the program by its best result rather than its average.
Principle 10
Let obsessions become theses, and know their exit
A reporter told Kim directly that his investments in BrickLink, Stokke, and Lit Motors had "become an issue." The BrickLink investment came straight from his love of Lego. It ended in November 2019 with a sale to the Lego Group itself, the best possible buyer for a community of Lego enthusiasts. Many founders bet on their personal passions. Fewer of them recognize when the natural owner of the asset is someone else.
Personal enthusiasm is a legitimate source of investment insight because it gives you knowledge of a market that outsiders lack. The risk is attachment. The useful habit is to identify the ideal acquirer on the day you invest.
Tactic: When investing in something you personally love, name its most natural long-term owner in writing at the time of purchase, and revisit that note every year.
Principle 11
Name the debt and repay it in institutions
"I promised to pay off my debt to society, regardless of the ruling on my charge," Kim said. What followed were permanent institutions rather than single gifts: Korea's first pediatric rehabilitation hospital, its first public one in Daejeon, a children's palliative care center at Seoul National University Hospital, 130 small libraries, an annual programming challenge, and a foundation set up to keep running without him.
Whatever one thinks of the timing, since the foundation opened in the same year as his acquittal, the form is instructive. A one-time donation is quickly forgotten. A hospital stays in its city and keeps treating patients. Kim also concentrated almost all of his giving on children, which gave his philanthropy a recognizable identity instead of scattering it across many causes.
Tactic: If your reputation needs repair, commit to one field and build a lasting institution in it, rather than spreading gifts that will not be remembered.
Principle 12
Keep the first world running
The Kingdom of the Winds launched in 1996 and is still being serviced. It produced a mobile adaptation that topped the App Store in Korea in 2020, and a sequel announced in October 2024, twenty-eight years after the original. Kim also spent ten years collecting old computers and opened a museum for them on Jeju in 2013. He treated the past as something worth maintaining rather than something to discard.
Most companies shut down early products to concentrate on newer ones. Kim's record suggests a different calculation. A long-running original product is a source of brand loyalty, a store of intellectual property, and evidence that the company keeps its commitments to players. Players who joined in 1996 remembered that the game was still running.
Tactic: Before shutting down your oldest product, calculate what it would cost to keep a minimal version running indefinitely, and compare that to the trust you would lose by ending it.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Kim Jung-ju, May 2018, on reading that Nexon had been designated a conglomerateThis made me look back at my life, at the small company I started with my friends back in 1994.
— Kim Jung-ju, press release, May 29, 2018During the first trial, I promised to pay off my debt to society, regardless of the ruling on my charge.
— Kim Jung-ju, May 2018Nexon could grow into a large company with passion of our employees and horizontal corporate culture. I think the culture should be maintained for the company's continuous innovation and healthier growth.
— Kim Jung-ju, as recalled by his friend Leah D., March 2022People are pretty much the same no matter who they are or what their status is — no matter how much money they have.
Maxims
- Charge for the self, not the door. When the product is a place, the crowd is the asset, and admission should be free.
- Hidden rules accrue interest. Any odds you conceal from customers will eventually be disclosed by someone else, at a time you did not choose.
- The people who leave are your scouts. Former employees who start companies are testing ideas on their own risk, and the successful ones are your best acquisitions.
- Raise only what keeps your "no" intact. Bootstrapping is valuable mainly because it lets you turn down offers.
- Your exchange is your identity. Where you list decides who owns you, how patient they are, and how you will be judged at home.
- Opacity looks like guilt in a crisis. A structure that is never explained will be explained for you by the press, and unfavorably.
- Old friends in power are a governance issue. Closeness that helped build the company becomes a liability once those friends hold public office.
- Succession has three parts. Management, control, and ownership separate on different schedules, and each needs its own plan.
- Pay for the failures. In a hit-driven business, the closed projects are what it costs to find the successes.
- Keep the first world running. Maintaining your oldest product is a promise to the customers who were there first.
If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available. In the United States, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. In South Korea, call 109. Elsewhere, contact local emergency services or a crisis line in your country.
