Game publisher NCSoft kicks into full gear to accelerate research and development of AI

[Courtesy of NCSoft]

SEOUL -- To diversify its main business channels and nurture a new future growth engine, South Korea's major game publisher NCSoft has merged its centers for artificial intelligence and natural language processing to a single research and development headquarters for AI technologies.

NCSoft is recognized as the creator of South Korea's iconic massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) "Lineage." The company established in 1997 is now a strong player in the global mobile game market, supported by the popularity of the Lineage series games.

While focusing its business capabilities to attract more gamers in the global market, NCSoft selected AI technologies as the company's future growth engine in the early 2010s. In 2011, NCSoft established an AI specialist team and the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Team, a research team dedicated to the research and development of generative AI-based language models, in 2022.

NCSoft said in a statement on March 5 that the company CEO Kim Take-jin restructured the company's AI research divisions into "AI research headquarters." The research division directly controlled by the CEO will be led by Lee Yeon-su, the former Executive Director of NCSoft's Language AI Lab.