Wemade Chairman Park Kwan-ho has defined 2026 as the company’s “harshest survival turning point since its founding” and declared a high-intensity overhaul.

In a New Year’s message to employees on Thursday, Park said the current crisis stems from a structural contraction in the market for massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). He said the company can no longer secure its future with only past success formulas and inertia.

Wemade will push “market diversification” and “global expansion” as its core strategies from this year, moving away from reliance on MMORPGs as a single genre. Park stressed the company must create games designed for the global market from the start through a simultaneous launch strategy centred on next-generation global platforms such as Steam and consoles.

He also signalled sweeping changes to corporate culture and its personnel system. Park strongly criticised siloed departments and a culture of shifting responsibility.

"Departments exist only for efficient division of work, not to divide responsibility," he said. "Behaviour that protects only one’s own work boundaries and shifts responsibility to other departments, rather than focusing on business success, can no longer be tolerated," he warned.

To that end, Wemade will completely overhaul work processes and evaluation methods from this year, centred on the HR function. Future evaluations are expected to be based not on simple role fulfilment but on whether deliverables materially contributed to business success.

Park also set the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) as a “condition for survival”. "A shift to an AI-centred way of working is not a choice but a necessity," he said. "Beyond simple adoption, each organisation and individual must prove the answer to how it will be linked to results," he said.