Five Months on Strike: How Neople's Union Took On Nexon Over a Bonus

Dungeon & Fighter turned twenty in 2025. The side-scrolling brawler from Neople, a Nexon studio based on Jeju Island, is one of the most profitable games ever made, and its mobile version had just helped deliver a record year in China. Nexon planned a two-day fan festival for the birthday, DNF Universe 2025, on August 9 and 10.

It never happened. On July 15, 2025, Nexon cancelled the event. A week earlier, on July 7, Neople's union had begun a full strike. The walkout, and the five months of dispute around it, became the most serious labour fight the Korean games industry has seen.

What the fight was about

The argument was over how to share a windfall. Neople made an operating profit of about ₩982.4 billion in 2024, a record driven by Dungeon & Fighter Mobile in China. The union said the company had nonetheless cut a bonus tied to new development projects, known internally as GI.

Its central demand was a profit-sharing payout, called PS, of 4% of operating profit, about ₩39.3 billion, to be shared among all staff, including non-members, on a performance basis. It also wanted the GI scheme improved and working schedules that did not depend on overtime. Later in the talks, the union offered to lower the PS request to 2%. The company said it had already paid sufficient bonuses and offered a one-off "spot" bonus instead.

The timeline

• January 7, 2025: bargaining begins.
• April 29: the eighth main session fails; three rounds of mediation follow in May.
• May 26 to 28: 93.48% of voting members back a labour dispute.
• June: the union refuses overtime and early starts, holds a three-day full strike and rotates strikes by team.
• July 7: a full strike begins, planned to run until August 8.
• July 15: Nexon cancels DNF Universe 2025. The union says the timing was a coincidence.
• Mid-August: overall attendance at Neople falls to about 70%.
• September 5: after a fourth round of talks fails, the union suspends the full strike and returns to work on September 8 under a "work-to-rule" stance, refusing overtime.

A union splits, then a deal

The strangest twist came from inside the labour movement. Neople's union was a branch of the Nexon branch of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions' chemical, textile and food workers' union, the same structure Nexon staff had built in 2018. In late October 2025, after disagreements between Neople's representatives and those from Nexon Korea and Nexon Games, the Nexon branch voted to dissolve its Neople sub-branch, and the Nexon branch's leader resigned.

Neople's members regrouped quickly. On November 4 and 5, 810 of 1,078 members voted, and 743 of them, 91.73%, backed forming a separate branch under the same national union. Meanwhile the company began paying 2025 raises to non-members first, at the average rate the Nexon branch had agreed for other group companies.

The pressure on both sides produced a deal. On November 18, 2025, management and union reached a tentative agreement, which members approved on November 19 and 20. It included:

• ₩4 million of wage-increase funding per person
• welfare points raised by 1.1 million a year, to 3.6 million
• more housing support for staff on Jeju
• 6,000 hours of paid time off for union duties

There was no 4% profit share. Neople said it would keep working on a fair, sustainable, performance-based pay system.

Why it matters

The Neople strike tested a question that every profitable game studio eventually faces: when one game prints money, who gets a share? The union did not win profit-sharing, but it won real money, a formal role and proof that a games strike can hold for months in Korea.

It also exposed the weak points. Korean reports noted that the team running live Dungeon & Fighter, the source of most of Neople's revenue, was largely not on strike, which limited the union's leverage. And the split with the Nexon branch showed how hard it is to keep workers at a rich studio and its less profitable sister companies on the same side.

WGC's take: this will not be the last bonus fight in Korean games. The industry pays well in good years and cuts hard in bad ones, and profit-sharing is the obvious bridge. Watch the 2026 wage talks, the first for Neople's new branch, and whether other studios with one huge game, from Krafton to Shift Up, adopt formal profit-sharing before their staff ask. For the bigger picture on hours and overtime, see our long read on crunch.