PUBG: Battlegrounds publisher Nexon has entered a publishing agreement with Blizzard for Overwatch in Korea.
This was announced on March 29 by Blizzard president Johanna Faries and Nexon co-CEOs Dehyun Kang and Jungwook Kim. The teams will be working closely to publish Overwatch on PC within this year, and to deliver services “tailored for Korean players.”
Nexon is set to handle live service and business operations for the Korean market, while Blizzard will provide the Overwatch IP and continue to lead overall game development. The partnership also includes a plan to deliver “hyper-localized content” and “expand the IGR ecosystem” to further strengthen the game’s presence in Korea.
In addition, the announcement claims Nexon and Blizzard will begin recruiting additional local talent to bring this vision to fruition.
“Korean players have long been a vital part of our global community, and their passion has helped shaped Overwatch in meaningful ways,” said Faries in the announcement. “We look forward to partnering with Nexon, whose deep understanding of the Korean market and strong live-operations expertise is widely recognized, to continue to deliver exciting and dynamic experiences for players.”
“By combining Blizzard’s outstanding development expertise with NEXON’s strengths in live service operations, we aim to bring Korean players the best possible Overwatch experience,” added Kang and Kim.
The agreement comes after an eventful last couple of months for both companies, to say the least. In February, QA workers at Blizzard ratified a union contract with parent company Microsoft. This followed two similar efforts throughout 2025, with Blizzard’s story and franchise development team unionizing in August, and the Blizzard’s platform and technology workers unionizing in October. The Overwatch team itself formed a nearly 200-person union last May.
Meanwhile, back in November, Nexon CEO Junghun Lee was widely criticized for saying that it’s important to assume that every game company is now using AI, despite developers increasingly saying it has a deleterious impact on the industry.
Lee, however, remains firm on this stance. During a capital markets briefing held in Tokyo on March 31 of this year, the CEO told investors that Nexon intends to leverage AI tools across every step of its development process and live services. One of the goals, then, is to help developers “spend more time thinking and less time typing” by reducing the time writing code. Companies like Capcom and Owlcat Games have shared similar ideas recently, exploring how genAI can help speed up production and allow developers to iterate faster, respectively.
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