“The First Berserker: Khazan is the first of three games designed to introduce our Dungeon & Fighter to a global audience. The game got off to a solid launch with good critical scores in Western markets on both PC and console,” said the company in a statement.

Further in its statement, it reiterated the fact that personnel were being allocated off the project to make more effective use of resources across current and future projects at the company.

“As the development roadmap for The First Berserker: Khazan enters its final stage, Neople has reorganized its teams to more effectively allocate resources across current and future projects, including the pipeline of games designed to attract players in every major market globally.

“This adjustment is not related to workforce reduction or team dissolution. It reflects a planned reallocation of talent to support live service operations and new initiatives across Neople and Nexon affiliates.”

The report of Neople’s staff being reallocated came about thanks to Yonhap News Agency. The latter noted that, out of the 100 developers who worked on The First Berserker: Khazan, an undisclosed number have been put into a “transition unit” known as “R Team”. Nexon has also stated that it will “actively support the reassignment of personnel who gained expertise in completing a global AAA title through the Khazan project, so they can apply their experience and capabilities to other projects.”

The fact that The First Berserker: Khazan missed sales targets set by Nexon hasn’t really been a secret. The company revealed during an earnings call last month that its Q1 revenue for the game was lower than expected. Despite this, however, it “achieved our objective as a strategic first step in a multi-year plan to introduce Dungeon & Fighter IP to a global audience.”

The First Berserker: Khazan is available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. For more, check out our review. A year ago, after its release, creative director Junho Lee thanked players for supporting the game since its release.

“I poured my heart into making Khazan, telling myself that this would be the game I stake my entire career on, leaving absolutely nothing in the tank. By the time we launched in 2025, I truly believed I had given every last ounce of energy I had. But then, so many of you showed up. You played the game, you shared your honest thoughts, and you cheered us on.”

“Because of all that, not just me but the entire dev team found ourselves filled with even more energy than we spent building the game in the first place.”

Along with this, Lee also revealed interesting player stats, like the number of player deaths different bosses caused, and how many players were able to complete the game across its difficulty modes.

About 100 developers worked on Khazan, with an unknown number reportedly moved over to “R Team,” a “transition unit.” Nexon, its parent company, doesn’t officially consider the team dissolved, however (at least, not yet). The “large-scale Khazan project” is instead in its “final stages,” with some personnel left to complete any “remaining tasks.”

“As the roadmap of the large-scale Khazan project has entered its final stages, we decided to separate personnel into those who will focus on completing the remaining tasks and those who will be reassigned to other projects that require concentrated organizational and human resources,” said a spokesperson.

They also said that the company plans to “actively support the reassignment of personnel who gained expertise in completing a global AAA title through the Khazan project, so they can apply their experience and capabilities to other projects.”

You could also view this as Nexon squeezing everything it can out of the title, roughly one year later, and not seeing any further viability in support. And if that’s the case, then a smaller team is better suited to delivering any planned bug fixes or improvements while the majority move on.

Of course, you can’t sugarcoat the fact that this is happening because The First Berserker: Khazan didn’t meet the company’s financial expectations. It’s a shame because it most likely means no DLC, free updates or even a port to platforms like Nintendo Switch 2.

Either way, it’s been a good run. Current owners can claim the Immortal Fury set for free to celebrate its first anniversary and remember the fun times.

Söderlund has noted that the presence of generative AI presents a unique challenge to the gaming industry. While many developers are using it as a tool, he has said that the companies that best understand the challenge will end up being “the winners” in the race to effectively use AI.

“Every company has a plan; most will get it wrong,” Söderlund said. “They’re committing big investments in tools – but tools won’t help because they’ve misread the challenge. AI may be a race, but the winners won’t be the first movers – the winners will be the ones who understood the challenge. Think of game development as auto mechanics. The tools are available to everyone, but not everyone has the knowledge and experience to use them. That’s where Nexon is different.”

Lee, on the other hand, said that Nexon’s methodology in how it employs generative AI won’t lead to replacing the game developers responsible for a project’s creative aspects. Rather, “it frees them to create, with context.” This “context” is a reference to a collection of data used at Nexon that has been created over many years, dubbed the Mono Lake Initiative.

“Mono Lake makes the intelligence available across everything we build and operate – every developer, every live ops team, every product decision has access to the base of information we’ve accumulated over decades,” he said. “AI without context is just speed. Faster output of a generic outcome. Tools that know nothing about design history, player behavior, or innovation. Without context, AI is a race to the arithmetic middle where everyone’s games look the same. That’s not a competitive advantage. That’s noise, at scale.”

Lee also went on to describe the release of ARC Raiders as a “Trojan horse” that could be used to bring about “a shift in the mindset” about the use of AI technologies and how it “frees developers and live service teams to spend more time thinking and less time typing. More time innovating; less time writing code.”

“It changes how people work,” he continued. “The tools they use, how fast they can move, what they can accomplish. But what goes into our games – the creative content our players actually experience – that remains the work of our developers. Our methodology doesn’t replace creative people, it frees them to create, with context. Today, our best people spend more time making creative decisions – decisions guided by context…context based on billions of player decisions…context that precious few companies can match.”

Nexon’s biggest hit in recent times has been ARC Raiders, which is well known for having launched on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S with AI-generation used for some of its voice acting. However, the company has also been taking steps to remove some of it. More recently, the PvPvE extraction shooter got its Flashpoint update.

“I poured my heart into making Khazan, telling myself that this would be the game I stake my entire career on, leaving absolutely nothing in the tank,” wrote Lee. “By the time we launched in 2025, I truly believed I had given every last ounce of energy I had. But then, so many of you showed up. You played the game, you shared your honest thoughts, and you cheered us on.”

“Because of all that, not just me but the entire dev team found ourselves filled with even more energy than we spent building the game in the first place.”

Lee has revealed that 35 percent of players completed the game on Normal difficulty. 40 percent went on to “discover the truth,” while 25 percent went “deeper into darkness.” When it comes to boss fights, Viper was seemingly the toughest one on Expert difficulty, resulting in 17,734,694 deaths. Second place was Volbano, accounting for over 16 million deaths, and third place was Maluca, with over 12 million deaths.

On Hardcore difficulty, Maluca was the toughest one, with 206,169 deaths. Ozma took second place with 154,202 deaths, and Elamein was third, with 151,835 deaths. Taking all boss fights across all difficulties into account, there have been 273,804,045 player deaths in total.

Other causes of death are also quite interesting, with falling having resulted in over 20 million player deaths. Status effects had a hand in over 5.5 million deaths, and traps accounted for 2.2 million deaths. The deadliest non-boss enemies were Prince Spider, Lunatic Destroyer, and Wild Bear.

Players seemed to have preferred the spear as their weapon of choice by a small margin, accounting for 38 percent of all players. Second place was dual-wielding, which was used by 37 percent of players, with third place taken by greatsword, used by 25 percent of players. Getting more specific, the Bloodthirsty Fiend’s Dual Wield was the most-used weapon, followed by the Sentinel’s Greatsword and the Survivor’s Spear. Interestingly, 43 bosses were defeated by players using no weapons at all, with only their fists.

When it comes to defenses, players preferred the Bloodthirsty Fiend the most, followed by Crimson Fiend and Golden. For Phantoms, Kenta the Unyielding was the most popular, being called in 23,355,981 times, followed by Wulfric the Resilient, called in almost 7 million times. When leveling up, players overwhelmingly preferred to pump up their Endurance stat, which was raised 37,442,742 times.

Hardcore players have also devised their own unique challenges, with the fastest clear time for the entire game being two hours and ten minutes. This meant that, in such a short time, the player was able to beat 16 bosses throughout the world of The First Berserker: Khazan. The fastest bosses to clear were Reese, who took 17 seconds, Aratra, who took 13 seconds, and Shactuka, who took 16 seconds.

As for the future, the studio is currently working on a commemorative armor and weapon set for The First Berserker: Khazan. Dubbed the Immortal Fury Set, it will be available to all players who have purchased the game.

The First Berserker: Khazan is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Check out our review for more details.

https://x.com/PlayKhazan/status/2037633410647359621

https://x.com/PlayKhazan/status/2037633562162421892

This means that, while Nexon CEO Junghun Lee will continue to lead the company when it comes to business matters, Söderlund will be given more power over the creative direction of the various game development studios under the company.

“Nexon has all the assets to unleash dramatic growth—incredibly talented people, iconic franchises, large and committed player communities, and best-in-class live service capabilities,” said Söderlund in a statement. “This is an enormous opportunity, but one that will require deep focus and discipline. Junghun and I are aligned on what needs to happen and I’m ready to get to work.”

“Patrick and I are fully aligned on transforming Nexon,” Lee said. “He’s built studios, attracted the industry’s best people to work with him, and shipped massive global hits. That’s exactly what Nexon needs right now.”

More details about Söderlund’s new position in Nexon’s overall hierarchy are slated to be revealed on March 31st, at the company’s Capital Markets Briefing. The briefing will also include Neople CEO Myeongjin Yun, along with other members of Nexon’s leadership. The company has teased that, among other things, it will also provide an update on its strategies surrounding the growth of its IP, like Dungeon & Fighter, as well as demo footage of new and upcoming games.

Söderlund is no stranger to executive positions at large companies. Aside from serving as CEO of Embark Studios itself, he also served as chief design officer and executive vice president of worldwide studios at Electronic Arts before he left the company in 2018.

Back in January, Söderlund had spoken about the challenges faced during the development of ARC Raiders, especially when it came to competing against industry giants like Call of Duty and Battlefield. Since Embark Studios was a young team, having only released one multiplayer game—THE FINALS—Söderlund noted that, rather than growing the studio with more developers, Embark Studios focused more on refining its development pipeline and building the tools it would require.

“To start a new studio from scratch and to compete with the likes of EA and Activision and others, if you follow traditional development methodologies, you’re going to have to have five, six, seven hundred people,” he said. “We didn’t want to be that, we couldn’t afford that many people, and we didn’t believe that was the way to get to the right type of innovation and quality.”

“So when we started Embark, we spent the first seven to 10 months conceptualising ARC Raiders and most of the time we spent on production methodologies and building tools and pipelines to change the way games were being developed. With the ambition of being substantially faster in developing games, so that we could compete with these big publishers but with a substantially smaller team.”

ARC Raiders is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

The post is a the latest iteration of the Xbox Excellence Awards, which was created last year to celebrate how players engaged with various releases on Xbox. The Store Rating category lists 2025 games with the best ratings on the Microsoft Store, with an added requirement of the title having at least 500 ratings. Player Engagements is about the average number of hours spent on a game by each player within the first six weeks of a game’s release. Daily Active Users celebrates titles, expansions or updates with the highest single-day active users throughout the year. And finally Units Sold is fairly self-explanatory.

Going down the lists, you’ll find many of the biggest releases of the year, from ARC Raiders and Battlefield 6, as well as award-winning RPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Indie titles have also been well-represented, with games like Crime Scene Cleaner and Satisfactory making it into the lists. There also doesn’t seem to have been a singular genre to dominate the lists, since everything from sports games like EA Sports Madden NFL 26, to fantasy adventure life sims like Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, and even fighting games like Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics are well represented.

Curiously, none of the games was present in all four of the categories. At most, we got to see titles like Borderlands 4 being able to make it on to three of them: Player Engagement, Daily Active Users and Units Sold. Even ARC Raiders, which has seen quite a bit of success, is only on the Units Sold and Daily Active Users lists.

Microsoft has also emphasized that the lists represent a diverse collection of games developed by studios of varying sizes. All in all, it represents 48 unique developers based out of 13 countries, with 24 publishers having had a hand in their release. 19 of the games were self-published. “Taken as a whole, it’s an encapsulation of development on Xbox – we want gaming to reach you wherever you are, and for the teams making those games to find you from wherever they are,” wrote the company.

Full list of games:

Store Rating:

• Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Crime Scene Cleaner
• Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Hinokami Chronicles 2
• Digimon Story: Time Stranger
• Dreamcore
• Dynasty Warriors: Origins
• Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time
• Final Fantasy XVI
• Lies of P: Overture
• Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
• Little Nightmares III
• Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics
• Minami Lane
• Mullet MadJack
• Poppy Playtime Chapter 4
• Satisfactory
• Silent Hill 2
• Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds
• The First Berserker: Khazan

Player Engagement:

• Borderlands 4
• Digimon Story: Time Stranger
• Dynasty Warriors: Origins
• EA Sports College Football 26
• EA Sports FC 26
• Elden Ring Nightreign
• Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time
• Farm Together 2
• Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles
• Helldivers 2
• Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
• Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
• MLB The Show 25
• Monster Hunter Wilds
• NBA 2K26
• NHL 26
• Rust
• Satisfactory
• The First Berserker: Khazan

Daily Active Users:

• Arc Raiders
• Avowed
• Battlefield 6
• Borderlands 4
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
• DOOM: The Dark Ages
• Elden Ring Nightreign
• Fortnite
• Forza Horizon 5
• Grand Theft Auto V
• Grounded 2
• Helldivers 2
• Marvel Rivals
• Minecraft
• NBA 2K26
• Rematch
• Roblox
• Rocket League
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege

Units Sold:

• Arc Raiders
• Assassin’s Creed Shadows
• Battlefield 6
• Borderlands 4
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
• EA Sports Madden NFL 26
• EA Sports College Football 26
• EA Sports FC 26
• Elden Ring Nightreign
• Grand Theft Auto V
• Helldivers 2
• Hollow Knight: Silksong
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
• MLB The Show 25
• Monster Hunter Wilds
• NBA 2K26
• PGA Tour 2K25
• Ready or Not
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
• WWE 2K25

Nexon also reportedly signed a contract with Blizzard last year for StarCraft-related “content development,” according to the site’s sources. While a “dedicated team” has been established at Nexon’s Shooter Headquarters (which created Sudden Attack), the studio is still allegedly recruiting. It even brought on Choi Jun-Ho, who created the legendary Temple Smashing map for the original StarCraft.

The only talent that we really heard is involved is Dan Hay, best known for the Far Cry franchise. But despite this being a “cooperation contract,” Nexon is allegedly leading development instead of Blizzard. It’s apparently in the process of prototyping and evaluating “commercial viability.”

While it remains to be seen when – and if – it will be revealed, there’s doubtless excitement over the project. After all, Blizzard announced StarCraft: Ghost back in 2002 as a stealth action title set in the beloved universe. However, it would subsequently face delays and multiple reboots to its concept. It was ultimately confirmed as cancelled in 2014.

Assuming development is far enough along, there could be a reveal at Xbox’s June showcase, if not in August at Gamescom. It probably shouldn’t be expected anytime soon, though. Stay tuned for any details in the meantime.

“I didn’t expect ARC Raiders to be this successful,” said Lee. “It’s had around double the amount of success that I had initially anticipated.” The surprise and success have been attributed by Lee to how uniquely ARC Raiders is able to combine gameplay elements from other extraction shooters while still maintaining respect for players’ time. He noted that the company couldn’t “say that the gameplay of ARC Raiders itself is totally new and is completely unprecedented.”

ARC Raiders being successful has led to Nexon also exploring more partnerships with western developers, said Lee. While it’s far from a done deal as of yet, he did refer to this as being “an exciting and amazing opportunity for us”.

“We are able to enjoy more awareness in the western community now,” said Lee. “And we also have a lot of different developers who are curious to know how Embark and Nexon work together. I think this is an exciting and amazing opportunity for us, and I do definitely have this willingness to work more with more western developers who are innovative.”

Nexon also has a host of other projects in development based on western IPs. A report from back in April 2025 has indicated that Blizzard has been looking to team up with Nexon to develop and release smartphone games based on Overwatch and StarCraft. Blizzard has primarily been accepting bids from Korean studios for use of the IPs, with the licensing deal noted as being a package deal that includes rights to publish and service the titles in Japan and Korea.

As for ARC Raiders, its general success has emboldened Embark Studios to get more ambitious with its future plans. Design lead Virgil Watkins had spoken in January about wanting to “escalate” the challenges offered by the extraction shooter’s PvE elements beyond just massive robots with six legs.

“I think we are pretty happy with what they are now, but I don’t think we can subsist forever on that,” he explained. “I think eventually, if we introduce yet another six-legged giant spidery robot, it’s kind of like, ‘Okay, we got it.’ So yeah, I think it’s looking toward where we take those types of experiences in the future to something else or something additional, seeing how we can escalate the experience for the player on the PvE side.” A major sticking point with these ambitions, however, is whether or not the ARC Raiders servers could handle these challenges.

ARC Raiders is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, check out our review of its launch version. Also check out details about its new three-strike ban system.

Nexon CEO and president Junghun Lee issued a statement celebrating the strong sales of ARC Raiders, and noted that the extraction shooter even has the potential to become one of the pillars of Nexon’s overall portfolio. He also went on to say that the success of ARC Raiders has affirmed Nexon’s goals of global expansion as being on the right track.

“We are incredibly pleased with the strong retention and enduring enthusiasm players in all major markets worldwide have shown for ARC Raiders,” said Lee in his statement. “As pleased as we were with the October launch, reaching more than 12.4 million units and setting a record with 960,000 concurrent users in January demonstrates the potential for ARC Raiders to become another pillar in Nexon’s portfolio of blockbuster franchises.”

“Embark Studios has delivered exactly what players worldwide have expected from the game, a fresh, highly differentiated experience in a massive global game genre. ARC Raiders’ success is a clear affirmation of Nexon Group’s goal of expanding our global footprint with horizontal growth from all-new games that capture and grow massive game communities in every major market and on multiple platforms.”

Nexon and Embark Studios also celebrated the accolades that ARC Raiders has gotten since its release, which include winning Best Multiplayer Game at The Game Awards 2025, and being voted in as featuring the Most Innovative Gameplay as part of The Steam Awards 2025.

ARC Raiders was released on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S back in October, and since then, Embark Studios has been celebrating one milestone after another. More recently, the studio celebrated the game’s first Expedition—Cold Snap—and how it has led to between 35 and 40 percent of players resetting their progression.

Progression resets in ARC Raiders are entirely left in the player’s hands, with the extraction shooter offering rewards for players that might be willing to voluntarily wipe all of their progress and start again from scratch. Design director Virgil Watkins also discussed how Expeditions aren’t yet considered perfect, and how the studio is still taking in player feedback to bring in more improvements.

While Nexon has only now officially confirmed sales figures for ARC Raiders, a report from earlier this month had indicated that it had crossed 12 million units sold in the first weekend of 2026. This report came courtesy of industry analyst Rhys Elliot of Alinea Analytics, who estimated that the title had made more than $350 million in revenue across PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. According to the analyst, the PC version of the extraction shooter was the most popular, accounting for 53.5 percent of all copies sold. It was followed by PS5 in second place with 25.5 percent, and Xbox Series X/S rounding things out with 21 percent.

For more details about ARC Raiders, check out how the success of Helldivers 2 influenced Embark Studios to not go free-to-play. Also check out our review while you’re at it.

In the interview, as translated by Automaton Media, Nexon CEO Junghun Lee spoke about the use of AI in game development, and how just about every studio out there is using the technology in some way. To that end, he notes that even Embark Studios would need to use it since it essentially becomes a question of the studio’s survival.

“First of all, I think it’s important to assume that every game company is now using AI,” said Lee. “But if everyone is working with the same or similar technologies, the real question becomes: how do you survive? I believe it’s important to choose a strategy that increases your competitiveness.”

Embark Studios CCO and co-founder Stefan Strandberg had previously spoken about how AI would be used in ARC Raiders, noting that the usage in the PvPvE shooter is essentially at the same level as what we see in THE FINALS. “We use a combination of recordings of real actors and TTS,” he said. “So that’s true for [ARC Raiders] as well.” As for why these tools were used to begin with, Strandberg said that it was part of the studio’s attempts at creating larger worlds for its games despite the size of the studio itself staying relatively small.

“We are trying to maximize what we can, being a small team trying to get make rich worlds right, but still staying small… but we don’t use generative AI in other domains across the game,” he said.

The use of AI might be controversial to some, but it certainly hasn’t stopped ARC Raiders from hitting impressive milestones. Earlier this week, Nexon had revealed that more than 4 million copies of the shooter had been sold since its October 30th release date. This sales figure takes into account copies sold across PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

While the sales of ARC Raiders might great, even the concurrent player numbers for the extraction shooter have been quite impressive. Embark Studios recently celebrated the fact that the previous weekend saw more than 700,000 players experiencing the shooter at the same time.

“The many different ways you play and participate in ARC Raiders have completely blown us away, going far beyond what we ever imagined. You surprise us, you outsmart us, and you keep us on our toes. We wouldn’t have it any other way,” said the developers in a statement on social media. “The point being, you all push us to be better, and we’re truly grateful to have you along for this journey.”

ARC Raiders is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, check out our thoughts about why it and Battlefield 6 are stealing the spotlight from Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. Also check out our review while you’re at it.