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Join nowand also get a VIP ticket to GamesBeat Next (Nov 2-3, SF).Nexon plans to build a full-fledged user-generated content economy within the next two years. In June, Maplestory developer Nexon invited builders from across its global community to participate in the first season of MapleStory Vibe Camp, a three-week game creation contest inviting players to use AI-powered tools to code and build games using MapleStory IP, with participants publishing their creations on MSU Space, a game-building hub operated by Nexpace, Nexon’s Web3 arm, on the Verse8 game creation platform.
Nexpace is offering the winners of the Vibe Camp’s first season to monetize their games using distribution networks like YouTube Playables, with the goal of empowering them to turn game-making into their full-time careers, according to Nexpace chief operating officer Keith Kim in an interview with GamesBeat. He said MapleStory Vibe Camp represents one of Nexon’s first steps toward building a cohesive user-generated content ecosystem, although he did not expect any creators in the ecosystem to become “overnight millionaires.”
“I’m pretty certain it’s going to happen very soon,” Kim said. “Next year — maybe the year after — we’re going to start to see builders making $100, $500, $1,000, maybe $10,000 a month. That’s an inevitable future.”
For now, Nexon has set its goals a bit lower with the first season of Vibe Camp — but the numbers are promising so far. Between June 8 and June 29, 1,250 creators from 59 countries submitted 693 games, with 37 percent of participants writing code for their first time during the experience, according to Kim, who said the opportunity to build using MapleStory IP was a key motivator to get players to dip their toes into game development for the contest. Creators integrated 341,253 unique official MapleStory IP assets into their games, with an average of 434 assets per project across genres like real-time strategy, idle role-playing games, and tycoon simulators. “Short-form games are fun, but they lack one thing: context,” Kim said. “Imagine you have a shared IP — a shared asset that can be used in all of the short-form MapleStory-IP-based games. That will add another layer of value that most other short-form games will miss out on.”
The winners of the first season of MapleStory Vibe Camp were selected through a mixture of community voting and evaluation by Nexpace’s internal team, according to Kim, who acknowledged that his team had avoided a pure community vote to avoid manipulation by coordinated groups of fans. Moving forward, he said Nexpace aims to increase the level of community involvement in voting for future iterations of the contest, with the goal of developing a better understanding of what types of UGC content gamers want to see built using MapleStory IP. As of last month, every creator involved in the Vibe Camp program remained active in MSU Space after the contest wrapped up, working on 2,998 cumulative projects.
“We’ll have 10,000 new MapleStory-based short games every single day; that means the cost of discovery is going to be crazy,” Kim said. “And so our quest along the way would be: How can we understand what different users like in different games, and which users like which games? How can we actually find out those elements in different short games, and really showcase these games to prospective gamers? I think that’s very important.”
Kim said the heart of Nexon’s vision for UGC is a concept the company calls the “Infinite IP Playground,” describing this as “the idea that IPs should not be static stories or single-use games, but open universes continuously reimagined by the communities that love them.”
“Vibe Camp was the proof of concept,” he said. “What comes next is deepening that approach through VIBE IP infrastructure and expanding access, while working towards onboarding additional Nexon franchises down the line, evolving MSU from a MapleStory platform into a multi-IP home for UGC.”