"User acquisition costs are high, yes, but it's all about getting it right", says Anel Ceman, Senior Vice President at NC, who heads up the Mobile Casual Games Division. In this interview, he discusses the mobile strategy, the ad market, building a platform and the importance of failing fast.
NC's MMORPG Aion 2 has just topped the global Steam charts. It is in the top 10 rankings in 21 countries before its official launch on 5 October 2026. Steam ranks top sellers by revenue. Aion 2 will be free to play at launch, so its position in the charts is due to players choosing to pay for Early Access to a game that NC designed to be played for years. "Reaching #1 on Steam ahead of launch is a strong start, but a launch is only part of how we measure success," said Merv Lee Kwai, Co-CEO of NC America and Executive Publishing Producer for Aion 2. "NC has been making MMOs for more than 30 years. What matters is doing right by the Aion franchise and its players while building a game that holds up over time, with steady content and earning trust with players. That work hits a big milestone today, September 30, and I can’t wait for you to be a part of this journey."
NC (formerly NCsoft) is best known for its MMORPGs, including Lineage, Aion, Guild Wars 2, and Blade & Soul. However, in order to reduce its historical reliance on this genre, which is both risky and expensive, the company also aims to establish itself in the mobile market. By 2030, the company wants to generate 30% of its turnover from such games. To this end, NC set up a dedicated Mobile Casual Division in mid-2025. Anel Ceman, a European industry veteran who played a key role in the growth of Tripledot Studios and Outfit 7, was brought in as Senior Vice President to head up the division. Instead of developing games from scratch, NC has acquired several successful studios, including Lihuhu (Vietnam), which is known for its casual and puzzle games; Springcomes (South Korea), a specialist in the popular merge genre; and Moving Eye (Slovenia), a mobile game developer that specialises in tower defence and action mechanics. VeroPlay is an NC Corp. subsidiary responsible for the company's mobile casual games business, headquartered in Nicosia, Cyprus.
At the same time, however, NC is also developing its own platform called OptiFlow for operating and distributing such games. This is where Berlin-based JustPlay also comes in: NC secured a majority stake in the company in spring 2026. JustPlay is a mobile rewards platform and developer (JustPlay's in-house games studio is called Gimic) which operates over 40 casual games utilising advanced AdTech and player rewards. It serves as the traffic and user acquisition hub for NC's sub-studios. Upcoming mobile titles will rely significantly less on aggressive in-app purchases. Instead, NC is relying on the OptiFlow system, which is data- and AI-driven. All acquired studios will be connected to this central data platform in South Korea. Games undergo a rigorous five-stage testing phase involving concept development, prototyping, A/B testing with real users, scaling and rigorous discontinuation. Only those that are proven to be profitable and sustainable based on data will be released globally. We spoke to Anel Ceman about all this, as well as the future plans for OptiFlow, which will also be open to other publishers, the global ad market, user acquisition costs and the company's general strategy.
GamesMarket: You have been heading up NC's New Mobile Casual Division as Senior Vice President for over a year now. How did you come to join this South Korean company?
Anel Ceman: "I have been in the mobile casual industry for many years. NC is my fourth company. I have worked at Outfit7 Studios in Cyprus, Wildlife Studios in Brazil, and Tripledot Studios in the UK. In the beginning, when NC was looking to diversify, they did their homework and understood the mobile casual market and where the opportunities were. However, their previous experience with MMORPGs is totally different to mobile casual. So they needed someone who could operate at scale and knew what they were doing. They had the capital, and I had experience from before.
The playbook is therefore very clear. We're more about building an ecosystem, and because of NC's financial backing and the fact that the company sees things in decades, it's a lot easier to build an ecosystem. Then you know what pieces of the puzzle you need, and you can execute that strategy. That's why we were able to do it quite quickly."
GamesMarket: What is NC's strategic plan for the mobile casual market?
Anel Ceman: "When it comes to mobile casual games, this is something new for NC as a company. We've been growing quite quickly and are focusing on executing our strategy well. The market as a whole looks flat, but if you look a couple of layers deeper into the genres, you can see that puzzle and hybrid casual games are growing quite fast. It's roughly around 20% growth in those verticals. This is our sweet spot, and we are positioning ourselves as a mobile casual company. In the last earnings report, the mobile casual division already accounted for 22% of NC's revenue. So it's becoming a really significant revenue driver.
For mobile casual games, we use our expertise and infrastructure. We are building OptiFlow, a platform that combines all the tools and services for our studios. It covers everything from idea generation to creative production at scale, live operations systems, business intelligence, and A/B testing. We cover it all. Then we integrate all our studios into the platform. This year, we are also starting to open up our publishing services. In this new venture, we will collaborate with some of the world's top studios to publish their games, leveraging our expertise, playbook and OptiFlow platform to help them grow. Being part of our ecosystem should enable them to distribute and monetise much more effectively than they could independently.
