How to Apply to Nexon Games

9 min read Last updated April 20, 2026 1 open positions
Blake Crosley
Blake Crosley Researched using publicly available information, hiring data, and ATS analysis.

Key Takeaways

  • Nexon Games is the principal in-house development studio behind The First Descendant, Blue Archive, HIT2, and shared support work on MapleStory, Dungeon Fighter Online, MABINOGI, and KartRider; applying here is applying to a working studio, not to Nexon's publishing arm.
  • The studio is headquartered in Pangyo Techno Valley in Seongnam, just south of Seoul; nearly all roles are on-site or hybrid in Pangyo, and remote-first roles are rare outside of select senior engineering and global publishing positions.
  • Apply through the official Nexon careers portal (career.nexon.com), and filter explicitly for Nexon Games postings; Nexon Korea, NEOPLE, and Nexon Games each post separately and the hiring teams do not share pipelines.
  • Korean-language resume (이력서) and self-introduction (자기소개서) are required for the vast majority of studio-floor roles; English-only applications are accepted only for explicitly tagged global or expat-track positions.
  • The interview loop is two rounds plus a take-home for most disciplines: a deep practical interview with the hiring team, then an executive or culture-fit interview with studio leadership and HR.
  • Live-service fluency is the single most repeated theme in hiring feedback; show measurable KPI ownership (retention, CCU, ARPPU, frame time, crash rate) on a shipped title rather than abstract methodology.
  • Compensation is competitive within Korean industry norms with performance bonuses tied to live-service results and equity exposure indirectly via the Tokyo-listed parent NEXON Co., Ltd.; expect pay bands to trail US-coastal AAA studios but lead most of the rest of the Korean market.
  • Nexon Games hires year-round rather than in fixed cohorts; act on roles within two weeks of posting because senior positions on flagship titles typically close fast.
  • Stable tenure (2+ years per prior role) and a specific, well-researched answer to 'why Nexon Games' weigh heavily in the final-round decision; generic 'I love Nexon games' answers consistently underperform.

About Nexon Games

Nexon Games Co., Ltd. is a South Korean game development studio headquartered in the Pangyo Techno Valley in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, the heart of Korea's gaming industry cluster. Established in December 2022 through the consolidation of NetGames Inc. and Nexon's internal development teams, Nexon Games operates as a wholly owned development subsidiary of Nexon Korea Corporation, which itself reports up to the Tokyo-listed parent NEXON Co., Ltd. The studio employs roughly 1,500 developers, designers, artists, sound engineers, and producers, making it one of the largest dedicated game studios in Korea and the principal creative engine behind several of Nexon's flagship live-service titles. Nexon Games is best known for The First Descendant, a free-to-play third-person looter-shooter built on Unreal Engine 5 that launched globally in July 2024 and broke into Steam's all-time concurrent-user top ten on its debut weekend. The studio also leads development on Blue Archive, the global anime-style RPG co-produced with Yostar; HIT2, a mobile MMORPG; and continues to support marquee Nexon IP including MapleStory, Dungeon & Fighter (Dungeon Fighter Online), MABINOGI, and KartRider successor titles where engineering or live-ops support is shared across Nexon's Korean studios. Culturally, Nexon Games sits at the intersection of two traditions: the rigorous, schedule-driven discipline of Korean MMO development (long supported by Nexon's two-decade publishing dominance) and the modern, console-grade production values demanded by Unreal-Engine-5 cross-platform shooters. The company invests heavily in proprietary tooling, motion capture, in-house cinematics, and a 24/7 live-operations infrastructure that supports concurrent player bases in the hundreds of thousands across PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. For job seekers, Nexon Games offers exposure to one of the very few Korean studios shipping AAA-scale free-to-play games to a worldwide audience, with English-language localization, global publishing, and console certification all handled in-house. Compensation tends to be competitive within the Korean industry, with stock-linked incentives tied to Nexon Co., Ltd.'s Tokyo Stock Exchange performance, performance bonuses tied to live-service KPIs, and the cachet of working on titles that ship to tens of millions of players worldwide.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Find open roles on the official Nexon recruiting portal at career

    Find open roles on the official Nexon recruiting portal at career.nexon.com (Korean) or careers.nexon.com (global), filtering by 'Nexon Games' as the employing entity since Nexon Korea, NEOPLE, and Nexon Games each post separately under the Nexon umbrella.

  2. 2
    Create a Nexon recruiting account and complete the standardized application form

    Create a Nexon recruiting account and complete the standardized application form, which requires Korean-language personal history (이력서) and a self-introduction essay (자기소개서) of roughly 1,000-2,000 characters covering motivation, strengths, project experience, and long-term goals.

  3. 3
    Submit a portfolio link (ArtStation, GitHub, personal site, or PDF) for art, des

    Submit a portfolio link (ArtStation, GitHub, personal site, or PDF) for art, design, and engineering roles; live-service producer and PM roles instead require detailed project case studies with measurable KPIs such as DAU, retention, ARPPU, or live-event uplift.

  4. 4
    Pass the document screening (서류전형), then complete a role-specific assessment: a

    Pass the document screening (서류전형), then complete a role-specific assessment: a take-home programming task or LeetCode-style coding test for engineers, a level or system design exercise for designers, an art test for 3D and concept artists, and a written case for producers and analysts.

  5. 5
    Attend a first-round practical interview (실무면접) with the hiring team lead and tw

    Attend a first-round practical interview (실무면접) with the hiring team lead and two to four senior peers, conducted in Korean, focused on prior project depth, technical reasoning, and how you collaborate inside a strike team on a live game.

  6. 6
    Attend a second-round executive or culture-fit interview (임원면접) with the studio

    Attend a second-round executive or culture-fit interview (임원면접) with the studio head, head of HR, and a senior director, covering long-term career fit, alignment with Nexon Games' live-service philosophy, and references from prior employers.

  7. 7
    Receive a written offer with annual salary, performance bonus structure, signing

    Receive a written offer with annual salary, performance bonus structure, signing or relocation package if applicable, and a start date that typically falls 30-60 days after offer signing to accommodate Korea's standard one-month notice period.

Resume Tips for Nexon Games

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Submit a Korean-language resume (이력서) and self-introduction (자기소개서) for any role

Submit a Korean-language resume (이력서) and self-introduction (자기소개서) for any role based in Korea; English-only resumes are accepted only for global publishing, English localization, or expat-track engineering roles posted as 'English OK'.

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Lead with shipped titles, not job titles: list every game you contributed to wit

Lead with shipped titles, not job titles: list every game you contributed to with platform, engine, your specific role, team size, and one quantified outcome (concurrent users, retention lift, frame-time reduction, crash rate, art assets shipped).

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Name the engines and toolchains you have actually used in production: Unreal Eng

Name the engines and toolchains you have actually used in production: Unreal Engine 5, Unity, proprietary engines, Perforce, Jira, ShotGrid, Houdini, Maya, Substance, Wwise, FMOD, Jenkins, Unreal Insights, RenderDoc, and any in-house build pipelines.

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For engineers, quantify performance work with hard numbers: 'reduced GPU frame t

For engineers, quantify performance work with hard numbers: 'reduced GPU frame time from 14ms to 9ms on PS5 base profile,' 'cut server tick CPU by 32% under 200-CCU load,' 'eliminated a 7% crash bucket on Android Adreno devices'.

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For artists, link an ArtStation portfolio with breakdowns showing topology, UVs,

For artists, link an ArtStation portfolio with breakdowns showing topology, UVs, texture work, and in-engine screenshots; raw renders without engine context underperform because Nexon Games ships into shipping pipelines, not portfolio reels.

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For designers and producers, show live-ops literacy: cite seasonal events, battl

For designers and producers, show live-ops literacy: cite seasonal events, battle passes, gacha or shop tunings, balance patches, or LiveOps calendars you owned, and include the metrics those interventions moved.

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Mention any Korean language proficiency level (TOPIK level if you have one) for

Mention any Korean language proficiency level (TOPIK level if you have one) for non-Korean candidates; Korean fluency is required for most studio-floor roles, while English-only roles cluster in global publishing, community, and select senior engineering positions.

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Keep the document to two pages, use a clean single-column layout that the Nexon

Keep the document to two pages, use a clean single-column layout that the Nexon ATS can parse cleanly, and avoid graphics-heavy templates that break tag extraction in the recruiting platform's parser.

ATS System: Nexon Recruiting Portal (proprietary)

Nexon group companies, including Nexon Games, Nexon Korea, and NEOPLE, share a proprietary in-house recruiting platform hosted at career.nexon.com. The system is not a standard ATS like Greenhouse, Workday, or Lever; it is a Korean-language portal with a structured profile, a required self-introduction essay (자기소개서) with multiple prompts, role-specific document uploads, and an internal pipeline for document screening, assessment scoring, and interview scheduling. Each posting routes applications to the specific subsidiary that owns the role.

  • Create a single Nexon recruiting account and fill out the master profile completely once; subsequent applications pull from this profile, and incomplete profiles are filtered out before a human reviews them.
  • Write the self-introduction essay (자기소개서) in Korean using the four standard prompts (motivation, strengths and weaknesses, key project experience, long-term career goal); each section should be 500-1000 characters with concrete examples rather than generalities.
  • Upload the portfolio as a single PDF under 20MB or as a stable external link (ArtStation, GitHub Pages, personal domain); the portal does not reliably embed Notion, Google Drive previews, or large multi-file uploads.
  • Filter postings explicitly by company entity ('Nexon Games' vs 'Nexon Korea' vs 'NEOPLE') so your application routes to the correct hiring team; cross-entity transfers mid-pipeline are not supported.
  • Submit applications during Korean business hours (KST); the portal occasionally flags off-hours bulk submissions for additional review, and time-zone-localized timestamps appear in the recruiter's queue.
  • Save the application reference number (job posting ID) when you submit; recruiter follow-ups and status checks reference that ID, not your email address.

Complete Nexon Recruiting Portal (proprietary) Resume Guide →

Interview Culture

Interview culture at Nexon Games reflects the dual identity of a Korean enterprise game maker shipping global console-grade titles.

Expect a multi-round, sequential process that is rigorous but rarely adversarial. The first practical interview (실무면접) is the deepest technical filter and usually runs 60 to 90 minutes with the team lead and two to four senior peers from the discipline you are joining. Engineers should prepare to whiteboard or share-screen on real systems they have built, walking through architectural choices, trade-offs, and what they would change today; expect at least one question on multiplayer networking, memory, threading, or live-service backend resilience, and a follow-up on how you debug a regression that only shows up in production at scale. Designers face scenario questions framed around live games, often anchored to titles already in Nexon's portfolio: 'You own the Season 3 battle pass for The First Descendant, retention dipped 12% in week 2, what is your hypothesis tree and what experiments do you run first?' Artists are asked to walk through three to five portfolio pieces in detail, defending topology, silhouette, material setup, and how each asset performs on the lowest-spec target platform the title supports. The second round is the executive or culture-fit interview (임원면접). It is run by the studio head or a vice-president-level director with HR present and is shorter, usually 45 to 60 minutes, focused on long-term career arc, tolerance for live-service operating cadence, ability to take production criticism directly, and willingness to commit to multi-year shipping cycles. Korean interview etiquette applies throughout: arrive 10 to 15 minutes early, dress in business casual or smart business depending on the role tier, use formal speech registers (존댓말) by default, exchange business cards or name tags with two hands, and address the most senior person in the room first when entering. Take-home assignments are common for engineering and design and are expected to take four to ten hours of focused work; Nexon Games is explicit that they would rather see a smaller scope executed cleanly than an ambitious half-finished submission. Feedback turnaround between rounds is typically five to ten business days, and final offers issue within two weeks of the executive interview.

What Nexon Games Looks For

  • Demonstrated ability to ship: candidates who have taken at least one title from milestone build through commercial launch and into post-launch operations, even on a small team, are weighted significantly higher than those with prototype-only experience.
  • Live-service mindset: comfort with the operating cadence of a game that is never 'done', including seasonal content, balance patches, hotfixes at unsociable hours, and accountability for player-facing KPIs over long horizons.
  • Engine-grade depth: senior Unreal Engine 5 fluency for engineers and technical artists on console-shipping teams (Niagara, Chaos, Mass, Lumen, Nanite, networking, Insights profiling), or equivalent depth in Unity for mobile and Blue Archive teams.
  • Korean enterprise communication norms: the maturity to operate inside a hierarchical Korean studio, accept direct production feedback without defensiveness, and escalate disagreements through structure rather than around it.
  • Cross-cultural production literacy for global teams: the ability to coordinate across Korean studio leadership, Japanese parent company stakeholders at NEXON Co., Ltd. in Tokyo, and English-speaking publishing, marketing, and community partners in North America and Europe.
  • Player obsession backed by data: candidates who can read a retention curve, a funnel, or a monetization cohort and connect it back to a specific design or engineering decision tend to advance through the executive round.
  • Portfolio quality over portfolio volume: the studio prefers three to five deeply documented projects with breakdowns over a sprawling reel of unfinished work, especially for art, technical art, and design hires.
  • Long-term commitment signals: stable tenure at prior studios (typically 2+ years per role) and a coherent narrative about why Nexon Games specifically, not Nexon as a brand or 'a Korean game company in general', is the next step.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Nexon Games the same company as Nexon Korea or NEXON Co., Ltd.?
No. NEXON Co., Ltd. is the publicly traded parent listed in Tokyo. Nexon Korea Corporation is its primary Korean operating subsidiary that handles publishing, platform, and several internal studios. Nexon Games Co., Ltd. is a separate wholly owned development studio within that group, formed in December 2022, and is the studio behind The First Descendant and Blue Archive among others. Each entity recruits separately on the Nexon careers portal.
Do I need to speak Korean to work at Nexon Games?
For most studio-floor roles based in Pangyo, yes; conversational-to-fluent Korean (TOPIK 4-6 level for non-natives) is effectively required because day-to-day standups, code reviews, design docs, and production meetings are conducted in Korean. English-only roles do exist, primarily in global publishing, English localization, community management, and a small number of senior engineering positions explicitly tagged 'English OK' on the careers portal.
Where is Nexon Games located and is remote work available?
Nexon Games is headquartered at the Nexon campus in Pangyo Techno Valley, Bundang-gu, Seongnam, Gyeonggi-do, about 30 minutes south of central Seoul by Shinbundang Line. Nearly all engineering, art, design, and production roles are on-site or hybrid in Pangyo. Fully remote roles are rare and almost always limited to senior individual contributors in global publishing or specific live-ops shifts.
What engines and tech stacks does Nexon Games use?
Unreal Engine 5 is the primary engine for current console and PC titles including The First Descendant, with heavy use of Niagara, Chaos, Mass Entity, Lumen, and Nanite. Mobile titles, including Blue Archive, run on Unity. Backend services use a mix of in-house Korean game-server frameworks alongside C++, Go, and Java microservices, with Perforce as the standard version control system, Jira for project tracking, and Jenkins or proprietary CI for build pipelines.
Does Nexon Games sponsor work visas for foreign hires?
Yes, for senior and specialist roles where the skill set is not readily available in the Korean market. Nexon Games regularly sponsors E-7 specialty occupation visas for senior engineers, technical artists, and global publishing leads, and provides relocation support. Junior and mid-level roles are almost always filled domestically, so foreign candidates without prior shipping credits at a comparable studio face a steep bar.
How long does the Nexon Games hiring process take from application to offer?
Plan for four to eight weeks end to end. Document screening typically takes one to two weeks, the take-home or coding assessment one week, the practical interview is scheduled within one to two weeks of passing the assessment, and the executive interview follows within another one to two weeks. Final offers issue within two weeks of the executive round. Senior roles on critical live titles can move faster, sometimes closing within three weeks.
What is compensation like at Nexon Games?
Cash compensation is competitive within the Korean game industry and broadly comparable to Krafton, Smilegate, and NCSOFT for equivalent levels. Total comp includes a base salary, an annual performance bonus tied to studio and individual KPIs (typically 15-30% of base for solid performers on shipping titles), profit-sharing on live titles when available, and equity exposure indirectly via NEXON Co., Ltd. stock-linked incentives where eligible. Pay bands generally trail US coastal AAA studios but lead most of the rest of the Korean market.
What is the work-life balance like at Nexon Games?
Korea's statutory 52-hour workweek applies, and Nexon publicly tracks compliance, but live-service realities mean launch windows, major content drops, and live incidents can require concentrated overtime. Outside of those periods, most teams operate on a flexible-hours model with core overlap hours from late morning to late afternoon. Crunch is less institutionalized than it was a decade ago in the Korean industry, but live-ops on-call rotations are part of the job for engineering and ops roles.
Should I apply to Nexon Games or to NEOPLE if I want to work on Dungeon Fighter Online?
Apply to NEOPLE in Jeju. NEOPLE is the dedicated Nexon subsidiary that owns and develops Dungeon Fighter Online, including its derivatives such as DNF Duel and the upcoming Project DW. Nexon Games does not own DFO. Confusing the two is a common mistake in self-introduction essays and is treated as a serious negative signal in document screening.
Does Nexon Games offer internships or new-graduate hiring tracks?
Yes, but irregularly. Nexon historically runs a unified Nexon group new-graduate program (typically called Nexon Junior or NEXT) that funnels selected candidates into Nexon Korea, Nexon Games, and NEOPLE based on team needs and candidate fit. Internship programs run sporadically, often tied to specific summer cohorts or partnerships with Korean universities. Watch the careers portal in spring (March-April) and fall (September-October) for cohort openings.

Open Positions

Nexon Games currently has 1 open positions.

Check Your Resume Before Applying → View 1 open positions at Nexon Games

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