Maplestory Universe COO Keith Kim sits down with CCN. | Credit: Hameem Sarwar for CCN.
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Key Takeaways
Almost 2 million wallets have been created since MapleStory N launched in May.
The game has banned tens of thousands of cheaters since launch..
MapleStory N will complete the integration of Chainlink’s CCIP this month.
MapleStory N is the Web3 ‘revival’ of one of the world’s most beloved MMORPGs, but its launch has been a mixed bag of unbridled success and extraordinary challenges.
Now, four months after launching the full game and its crypto token, CCN editor Insha Zia caught up with MapleStory Universe’s COO, Keith Kim, at TOKEN2049 in Singapore, to see how the game and its ecosystem are doing.
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In May 2025, MapleStory N launched to a huge fanfare from players of the original 20-year-old MMORPG and new Web3 gamers.
It garnered over 1.6 million wallets created and players playing the game by August, when CCN first spoke with Kim (video below).
Since then, it’s been a rollercoaster ride.
Speaking with CCN at TOKEN2049, Kim explains that life has been pretty busy as the team juggles what he describes as a “tour of conferences” following the launch, along with the massive effort into building new features, systems, and quality-of-life updates.
During August, they rolled out three major updates, which included six new character classes. “A lot of users are playing,” says Kim, adding that revenue has been growing steadily.
“We’re expecting much, much bigger updates coming up this Winter, likely this December. And the sheer scale of that update will be at least a few magnitudes bigger than the one that happened in August.”
Kim teases that by then, the game won’t have “fully matured”. But is confident that there’ll be enough systems that show “even the Web2 gamers” that blockchain in a game makes it even more entertaining.”
Compared to the original MapleStory, which has drawn in millions upon millions of players with a concurrent user base in the hundreds of thousands, MapleStory N is “tiny, we’re just a fraction of that.”
Despite this, ambitions remain high, and Kim wants to expand into the gigantic Web2 following of MapleStory, “we’re very positive we’re going towards there.”
Hinting at future partnerships and collaborations, he says:
“We’ll have a very, very busy winter coming up.”
One notable development is MapleStory’s integration with Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interopability Protocol (CCIP).
It’s been in progress since last month and should be completed in October.
He says integration has been a “breeze”, adding “their team is brilliant. They are super focused on what they’re doing.”
No Cake
Despite the launch being a success, the MapleStory N’s rollout was anything but easy.
Kim admits that the token generation event (TGE) for the NEXPACE (NXPC) token was “super challenging.” It was a “huge accomplishment” for the team, but following this, the game suffered a tremendous amount of attacks.
It saw thousands of bad actors hack into elements of the game, use scripts to automate play, and exploit vulnerabilities to gain an advantage and extract as much value as possible from the game’s ecosystem.
Kim says that Nexon has been dealing with bots and hackers for the last 30 years. He’s confident that Nexon is “one of the best in the world” in tackling them; the firm has 700-800 people dedicated to solving these problems.
But the volumes of attacks MapleStory Universe has received “was a big surprise, even to Nexon”, he notes, adding that the number exceeded the combined total of attacks across Nexon’s massive gaming library.
“So they were quite surprised. Like, what are you guys doing? Why are you guys getting so much attacks”
Nexon partnered up with intelligence labs and others to battle such issues. However, “it’s always an arms race”, he says. Once an old threat is taken care of, a new threat emerges, a new method, a new vector of attack.
They’ve been successful in banning tens to hundreds of thousands of these accounts “a day.”
Building new content and great updates is as important as making sure that these abusers do not get in the way of normal gamers that are there to seek entertainment.”
But, being under threat all the time can make it quite challenging to stay focused, Kim admits.
The key is to remove the incentive to cheat to begin with. “There’s a delicious cake out there,” he muses, but instead of it being in a place that players aren’t allowed to be, Nexpace wants to hide the “cake” altogether.
“If the cake is $10 and abusers have to risk $10 to get there, it’s not worth it.”
By thoroughly researching and tracking the routes and mechanisms taken by these abusers, Nexon has become “really effective” in its efforts to clean up the ecosystem.
The Numbers
Now that the launch hype has faded, has MapleStory found its player base beyond the speculators?
Not quite.
As Kim reveals, 1 million wallets doesn’t mean 1 million unique users. The actual number of players is “way, way smaller,” he says.
“We definitely need to 10x, at least a few hundred thousand organic Web2 entertainment seekers.”
That, instead of appealing to the “I want to make $5 a day kind of guys.”
They are certainly part of the Web3 community, but they’re not the core contributors to those communities, he explains.
“I’m focusing on the entertainment seekers, and also the number of builders. MapleStory N needs builders who are interested, who love the IP.”
“Am I happy with the numbers right now. Hell no. Definitely no. I want to be very clear on this.”
Adding to that is the decline of the NXPC token.
The NEXPACE token was launched into a frenzied market, which, driven by hype alone, saw NXPC increase by around 2,900%.
This was brief, however, as the token has since fallen significantly.
“I’m not super happy about it, but we’re fixing it. There are a lot of people who have invested money into the tokens. We are not negligent about it. We’re on it.”
Brick by Brick
So what happens in the coming months and years when MapleStory N achieves its 10x playerbase goals, and even still, reaches the levels of success seen by the likes of League of Legends (LoL)?
“Even those games suffer from this repetitive gameplay that people get bored of.”
The issue is that the inherent nature of hype and speculation within crypto puts Web3 games in a tricky position. You can prepare for success, but it comes down to preparation and luck.
“It’s impossible to have one or two things right that happen and make your game the best. It’s a series of right choices multiplied by each other.”
In the long run, these incremental wins accumulate.
There’s no real way to say “I’m preparing this and that will make our game the best,” Kim explains, “it’s the fruit of a few hundred decisions, good decisions.” over the years.
It took years for the team to reinvent their platforms and record all their back-end elements to combine on-chain and off-chain components, as well as keep them in sync, says Kim.
Looking ahead, if they were to bring another IP on-chain, they might try a different approach.
Kim posits that he’d like to try to make the next game fully on-chain. With everything visible from day one, the community and builders won’t need to depend on the team “to make APIs and things like that.”
“One reason is that if we bring more casual games that don’t need to have super complex systems, and if these IPs prove to be a great base for the community expansion, I would like to give it a chance.”
For the Builders
The game needs builders to thrive. And so MapleStory N has opted to hand its players the tools they need to see their ideas and ecosystem contributions come to life.
Its Infinite IP Playground is the cornerstone of this ambition. It opens up the game’s API, allowing players to create new dApps and explore “metaplay,” a method of engaging with the game’s mechanics and economy without launching the full game.
It’s an “idea that cannot happen overnight,” he says. but “we’re launching.”
Progress is being made on all fronts, including academics, developers, affiliate programs, grant programs, and other initiatives that are underway.
It’s got a great name, Kim says, but when looking at how it’ll expand, and what MapleStory could be “according to the imagination of our community and builders,” he notes it’s been “baby steps in the past few months.”
Now, he adds, “we are tying up our shoe laces to lunge and launch at full speed.”
But everything’s on track, and they soon hope to see builders getting their products launched and “start making real profits”.
He wants to ensure that the Infinite IP Playground is not “just a vaporware or just a market phrase.”
Kim notes that he’s willing to travel to meet the builders, beta test their products, offer guidance, and devote his resources to elevating their products.
Eddie is a gaming and crypto writer at CCN. Covering the often weird and wonderful world of Web3 with an adoring, but skeptical eye.
Prior to CCN, Eddie has spent the past seven years working his way through the crypto, finance, and technology industry. He began with PR and journalism with Bitcoin PR Buzz and BitcoinNews.com, eventually working his way to become a copywriter with a dozen firms, including the likes of Polkadot before returning to journalism in 2023.
Having studied Radio production and journalism at University in the UK, Eddie spent a few years making podcasts and presenting on a local London radio station as he built up his writing chops.
A lifelong skateboarder, Eddie can often be found at the skatepark or touring the streets looking for something new to try. That, or kicking back playing JRPGs on his original PSP.
