Pixel-art RPGs, made in Seoul for players worldwide.

Gameplay and story come first

Kong Studios starts from a complaint its own team makes about mobile games: they are often judged as products built to earn money rather than games worth playing. In a 2021 interview that the company reposted on its site, Kim Sang-won, then the planning team lead for Guardian Tales, said the team studies fun seriously and throws a single stage away and rebuilds it dozens of times. The company puts its belief in one line on its site: original gameplay and narrative are the essence of a game, and Kong wants to make games that players around the world recognise. It calls this way of working craftsmanship.

To make one stage of the game, we throw it away and rebuild it dozens of times.

Kim Sang-won (김상원) · Planning team lead, Guardian Tales, in 2021 · Job&Post interview, reposted on Kong Studios' news page · 2021-05-07

The path to that belief ran through one small game and one large one. Kong Studios, Inc. was founded in the United States in March 2013. Its first title, the puzzle RPG Dungeon Link, was published by Gamevil and released worldwide in April 2015; the company says it reached 5 million downloads and more than $10 million in revenue before service ended in April 2019. Kong Studios Korea opened in Seoul in May 2015. In September 2017 Kakao Games signed a global publishing deal for a project then called Project Snake, and in July 2020 it launched as Guardian Tales, a pixel-art adventure RPG with puzzles, running jokes and a long story. Kong says it passed $100 million in revenue and 10 million downloads within seven months, outside China and Japan.

Why now: from one hit to a slate

The hit paid for growth. Guardian Tales passed $350 million in cumulative revenue by April 2022, and a $62 million Series B in August 2021 valued Kong Studios at $1 billion. The years after were harder. In March 2026 GameChosun reported that Kong had moved to emergency management, and attributed the move to accumulated losses, later titles that fell short of expectations and falling Guardian Tales revenue and players; the cuts fell mainly on developers. A company representative said Kong had decided to concentrate on new projects. Two of them now have publishers: Project Octopus, built on the Guardian Tales world, signed with Netmarble in November 2025, and Guardian Maiden, signed with Kakao Games in July 2026. In 2025 the Korean company also raised about ₩78.0 billion by issuing redeemable convertible preferred shares.

How a new game moves through Kong

Take an illustrative new title, followed through the current Seoul postings. A system designer writes the rules for growth, rewards and currency as documents and data, and a combat designer sets skills, boss patterns and difficulty. Concept artists draw characters to a style the project has already chosen, while UI artists and 3D animators build the screens and the motion. Client engineers working in Unity and C# handle logic, rendering, shaders and build pipelines, and a development PM tracks milestones, dependencies and risks. QA writes test cases for development and live builds. Before launch a publisher such as Kakao Games or Netmarble takes on marketing and service; after launch the live team keeps writing events, story and balance changes.

The judgement that stays with people is deciding when a piece of work is good enough. In 2022 Kim Sang-won, by then the Guardian Tales director, said a story has no right answer, so more time always raises quality, but a live game forces a choice before each update date about where to raise quality and where to stop.

The Seoul company is where Kong's games are made. In 2025 about 95 percent of Kong Studios Korea's revenue was service revenue from its US parent, and 2026 reports describe the Korean branch as handling development. A 2022 report described the US headquarters as running the business.

The 17 open Korea roles sit on this path: six game designers and a development PM, five engineers, four artists and one QA tester, spread over four named projects in development, Guardian Tales and the server team. Every seat makes something a player will touch.

Guardian Tales: a puzzle adventure run as a live game

Guardian Tales is the product that built the company. The player's hero travels through the kingdom of Kanterbury, solving dungeon puzzles by lifting boulders, throwing bombs and slinging across gaps, fighting bosses in real-time action, collecting heroes and weapons, and entering real-time PvP with a party of three. It is free to download and earns from items bought in the game; in 2022 Kong's CTO described the model as an online service with partial payment. Kakao Games runs the service in Korea and most of the world, Bilibili launched it in China in April 2021, and Kong has published it itself in Japan since October 2021, a launch it prepared with Yostar as a partner for local marketing and customer service.

The Nintendo Switch version followed on 4 October 2022 after about a year and a half of development. Kong said the game's real-time controls suited a console, kept the same online model, and planned simpler paid items because one service covers countries with very different purchasing power. The live game has also leaned on collaborations with Japanese animation, including Slayers NEXT in February 2022 and Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai in December 2022.

Two signed games and four projects in the postings

Guardian Maiden is the next signed title. Kong confirmed the name in May 2026 and showed its first video at Illusta Fes 11 at KINTEX on 23 and 24 May. Kakao Games describes it as a pixel-art collectible action RPG for PC and mobile in which a Hero and a Saint team up against an emerging evil, and it holds the service rights everywhere except Greater China. The stated target is a launch within 2026.

Project Octopus takes the Guardian Tales world into a different genre. Netmarble signed domestic and overseas rights on 5 November 2025 for what it called a 2026 title: a pixel-art casual action roguelike RPG set in a mine, where simple controls let any player assemble a combat build. Kong's own postings describe the same project, written Project octopus, as vertical-view light action with building and management elements.

The Seoul postings name more work in progress. Project MAZE is a 3D subculture roguelite action RPG built in Unity, centred on exploration and story. Project HERO is a new game using a well-known overseas IP, planned as an RPG for mobile and other platforms. Project ZERO is described as a classic 2D pixel mobile RPG. The QA team is also hiring for a new Kong Studios Korea project.

Who pays, and what was measured

Two groups pay. Players buy items in the game, and publishers sign for the right to market and run a title in their regions. The measured results are the company's and its publishers' own: $100 million in revenue in the first seven months outside China and Japan; $5.53 million on the first day in China; first place in Japan's Google Play top-grossing chart in October 2021 and 3 million downloads there within four months; $216 million in revenue and 25 million downloads by early September 2021; and 30 million downloads by the third anniversary in July 2023.

Read these numbers as a launch record. The cumulative revenue figure dates from April 2022, and the March 2026 report described falling revenue since. For a candidate the product question is whether the next games, made by the same Seoul team, can earn the reception the first one did.