Nexon is joining hands with the government to launch a large fund to nurture early-stage game developers, aiming to ease funding strains in South Korea's game ecosystem.

On June 23, Nexon said it will start a long-term investment programme to support game startups from seed to Series A, investing a total of 250 billion won over the next five years.

For the investment, Nexon established Nexon Partners. It also partnered with game-focused venture capital firm Kona Venture Partners to form the 120 billion won Kona Global IP Investment Association. The fund includes 60 billion won from a fund of funds under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, giving it a large public-private structure.

Early-stage investments will be made through a strategic fund led by Kona Venture Partners. Nexon then plans to invest about 130 billion won directly to help developers with follow-on growth, serving as seed capital.

Nexon adopted an open-ecosystem approach under which it provides funding even for intellectual property it does not publish directly. It said this is a major expansion of the shared-growth philosophy of the Nexon and Partners Center, which from 2012 to 2019 provided office space, legal advice and publishing support to promising startups.

Investment targets are next-generation game developers based on IP and new technologies with potential for global expansion. Nexon aims to secure a broad content ecosystem in advance, including “gamified AI”, in line with the shift in artificial intelligence technology.

Lee Jeong-heon (이정헌), head of Nexon Partners and concurrently head of Nexon's Japan unit, said South Korea's early-stage game development market has faced ongoing difficulties in raising funds even for promising developers due to weakened investor sentiment. He said Nexon will run the programme as a long-term ecosystem investment effort to close early-stage funding gaps through public-private cooperation and to discover next-generation global IP expected to emerge amid the AI transition.