I suppose with Throne & Liberty on the way, it only makes sense that NCsoft executives are granting interviews in western press – like the one Dr Songyee Yoon gave to GIbiz this week.
Yoon, who is married to NCsoft founder Kim Taek-jin, is currently the president of NCsoft with NCsoft’s West’s ascension under her belt; she was last in the news not because of anything she did but because of NCsoft’s shareholders’ toxicity. Readers will recall that earlier this year, investors all but rioted over the weak performance of Throne & Liberty in Korea, and as neither Kim nor Yoon was present, some male stockholders took it out on Yoon, toying with sexist insinuations of nepotism and incompetence with regard to her stewardship of NCsoft West. It was honestly pretty gross and obviously untrue, but it made headlines in the west anyway because Acting Chairman Park Byeong-moo basically announced Guild Wars 3 in the middle of defending her.
The same month all this was happening, Yoon published a book called Push Play: Gaming for a Better World, which focuses on the popularity of the games industry and how to highlight its positives instead of defending against bad-faith actors – a struggle over perception that other media like TV and movies have already dealt with.
A large part of the book – and therefore this interview – is devoted to changing how games and games development is perceived, starting with how it hires and treats women (not well!) and how that creates pipeline problems that impact the games themselves. But my favorite part is when Yoon discusses, of all things, NCsoft’s baseball team and how it improved the image of gaming in Korea. You knew NCsoft had a baseball team because we’ve talked about it several times. Remember the stadium cardboard people during COVID? That was at a game hosted by the NC Dinos.
“We noticed a change when NCsoft launched its baseball team,” she says. “As the company gained recognition for being large enough to own a professional baseball team in Korea, parents became less resistant to the idea of their children starting a career at a gaming company.”
Catch the whole discussion over on GIbiz.
