How The West Was Won

Despite making a series of smash-hit games for its home Asian market, NCSoft has struggled to translate to America—until its billionaire founder put his MIT-educated wife at the controls.

- David M. Ewalt

 

In 1998, a startup called NCSoft launched one of the most popular videogames of all time, although you’ve probably never heard of it. The game has earned more than $2.6 billion in revenue, including $330 million in 2016, 18 years after it hit the market. But you probably don’t know anyone who has played it.

Two decades after it was founded, South Korea-based NCSoft is one of the biggest game companies on the planet, with a long list of hits and successful franchises, yet it remains largely unknown across the Pacific. Games like its flagship title, Lineage, were blockbusters in Asia but failed to catch on with Western players. Repeated attempts to expand the business into the United States never gained traction.

But Kim Taek-Jin, the company’s billionaire CEO, is determined to change that. In the past two years, NCSoft has built a new game studio in California, pivoted toward a risky mobile strategy and begun developing new properties for Western audiences. Kim is so committed to translating NCSoft ’s success that he has even bet his family on the project: His wife, Yoon Songyee, an accomplished executive and neuroscientist known as Genius Girl in Korea, moved to California in 2014 with their kids to run the company’s U.S. subsidiary.

“We’ve been keeping our eye on the Western market for a long time, and it’s important to us,” says Yoon, the CEO of NCSoft West. “We have a big presence in Asia and Korea, but that’s not enough. We want a global audience.”