WEBTOON Entertainment is expanding its global intellectual property business through a strategic investment in RI Games Holdings, a game developer specializing in adapting established entertainment properties into interactive experiences. Under a definitive agreement announced on August 10, 2026, WEBTOON will acquire a 60% majority stake in RI Games Holdings for approximately $100 million, using cash on hand to finance the transaction. The investment is designed to give WEBTOON a dedicated game-development pipeline that can transform popular webcomic properties into new formats and create additional opportunities to engage their existing global audiences.
Building a Global Games Pipeline
WEBTOON and RI Games Holdings plan to develop and launch multiple games over the next four years using intellectual property from WEBTOON’s extensive catalog of digital comics. RI Games operates through development studios GrayGames and Offbeat, whose teams include professionals with experience working on titles such as MapleStory M, Tower of God: New World, The Seven Deadly Sins: Grand Cross, Lineage W, and Aion 1. By combining WEBTOON’s established stories and audiences with RI Games’ development expertise, the companies aim to create games capable of reaching both existing webcomic readers and broader international gaming communities.
Popular WEBTOON Franchises Targeted
The planned development slate includes games based on Overgeared, Doom Breaker, and Omniscient Reader, three WEBTOON properties that have accumulated substantial global audiences on the company’s platform. WEBTOON said Overgeared had generated approximately 1.3 billion views, Doom Breaker around 590 million views, and Omniscient Reader roughly 3.05 billion views as of the announcement. Expanding these franchises into gaming forms part of WEBTOON’s wider strategy of extending successful digital stories into multiple entertainment formats, including animation and other media.
Overgeared Leads the Expansion
One of the first major projects resulting from the strategy is an action MMORPG based on Overgeared, which is scheduled for a global launch later in 2026 and is being developed by GrayGames and published by Nexon. The game’s release is expected to complement an anime adaptation of Overgeared scheduled to premiere in October 2026, creating multiple entry points for audiences interested in the franchise. WEBTOON expects this coordinated expansion across comics, animation, and gaming to strengthen engagement with existing fans while introducing the intellectual property to consumers who may not currently use its digital comics platform.
RI Games Brings Development Expertise
RI Games Holdings was founded in 2022 by Kevin Tail Han, who also founded Redice Studio, a webcomic production company associated with major titles including Solo Leveling and Omniscient Reader. The company’s development teams bring experience from prominent Korean gaming franchises, providing WEBTOON with specialized capabilities for turning story-driven intellectual property into games designed for large international audiences. Under the agreement, WEBTOON’s acquisition of the 60% stake will take place in two installments, while additional performance-based provisions could affect ownership of the remaining 40% depending on whether specified milestones are achieved.
The RI Games investment represents another step in WEBTOON’s effort to build a broader entertainment ecosystem around intellectual property that originated on its digital comics platforms. By gaining control of a specialized game developer, WEBTOON can become more directly involved in adapting its properties for gaming while continuing to expand them across animation, television, film, publishing, and other entertainment categories. The success of the strategy will ultimately depend on how effectively WEBTOON and RI Games translate established webcomic audiences into gaming audiences while maintaining the appeal that made the original properties successful.