NCsoft – NCsoft rethinks its corporate culture and internal organization with the “NC Village”

A few months ago, NCsoft said it was in crisis. The South Korean giant is rethinking itself, changing its corporate culture to open up more and creating an NC Village to better coordinate the good ideas of its teams.

Since a long time, NCsoft has the reputation of being a group that is not very open to the outside world: the South Korean giant communicated little, rarely spoke about the content of its games under development, and even avoided beta-testing them before launching them. A positioning less and less appreciated by South Korean players (more open to criticism), which worried investors (especially following the commercial failure of Blade and Soul II) and which pushed Kim Taek-Jin to be moved by it publicly – we remember that a few months ago, the boss of NCsoft encouraged his employees to be creative and to share their proposals for improvement. Obviously, we are beginning to see the fruits of this.

NCing to encourage creativity

The South Korean giant is gradually changing its practices and intends to develop a new corporate culture that responds to the code name “NCing” (for “NC Thing”, the different “things” of NCsoft). In concrete terms, the group’s employees are encouraged to experiment more, to be creative and to ” try different things even if it is not immediately “productive”.

This less formal approach leads the developer to communicate more : a official blog has for example been resurrected (in Korean and English since the group also wants to open up more internationally), where the studio discusses its projects more openly. This is how NCsoft started to sketch out its next games, of different genres and not based on the group’s historical licenses, but also other creative projects – such as an interactive film project.
The group is also beginning to invest in social networks, for example by publishing vlogs on YouTube discussing the philosophical issues of artificial intelligence or to distribute some of his creations for free, reusable by amateur or professional creators. NCsoft also communicates more behind the scenes of the activities of its various laboratories – its artistic department or that dedicated to AI. Something to lift a corner of the veil and make the group a little less discreet.

Four houses in an “NC Village”

But it is obviously mainly internally that NCsoft evolves. In the context of long interviews granted to the South Korean press, NCsoft also indicates that it is working to modify its approach to game development within a new structure called ” NCVillage “, created at the beginning of the year and entrusted to the highest executives of the group – and the MMORPGs Throne and Liberty and the Project E should take advantage of this new method.

Concretely, the NC Village must oversee the creation of new licenses from NCsoft. Its creation is based on an observation made by Kim Taek-Jin: “good ideas do not naturally come together, they tend to disperse like grains of sand in the wind” and to prevent them from getting lost or that the different departments of NCsoft are scattered, so he created the “NC Village” whose function is to coordinate the “good ideas” of the group.

This NC Village is thus a “organ of production” which counts for the moment four “houses” each with a role to play : Art, Lightbox, Character and Brig.
The House character is thus dedicated to character creation: its teams imagine emblematic heroes and define their personality; the House light box gives substance to the new licenses through the narration and the notions of universe background; the House Art allows abstract ideas to take shape and be visualized; while the house Brig plans the design of each element and turns them into content bricks that can be used in a project.

When a concept emerges within the NC Village, these different houses are intended to work together : the House character can imagine a character, the house light box provide it with a story within a coherent world, before the whole thing is materialized by the artistic team and concretely integrated into a project – which could take the form of a game, but also of a series of animation, a novel or an interactive film, for example. The studio points out that the process must not be linear : the initial idea can emanate from one or the other house, and the others are then grafted to it to enrich it.
This is clearly how the oriental universe of Project E materialized: ideas had been considered for Throne and Liberty but could not be integrated into the project; they were therefore taken over by the NC Village until giving birth to Project E, a hybrid project which we do not yet know very well how it will articulate with Throne and Liberty but which has its own consistency with regard to the license.

Only the future will tell what the thoughts of NC Village will lead to, but the South Korean group sees it as a way to gain creativity, better mobilize its teams and involve players much earlier in the design process. . We will be curious to discover if this NC Village will last over time and the concrete results that will perhaps emerge in the months and years to come.