Kakao Games Fires Employee for Leaking Internal Information of 'Odin'

Kakao Games has fired an employee who leaked update plans for its flagship title, "Odin: Valhalla Rising," to other users.

On the 26th, according to Kakao Games, the "Odin" operations team announced through the official cafe the day before, "The disciplinary action against the employee involved in this leak incident has been decided as dismissal according to personnel policies," and added, "Civil and criminal measures are also being considered based on the investigation results."

Earlier, among "Odin" users, suspicions arose that a person presumed to be a Kakao Games employee frequently shared unreleased update information with guild members and acquaintances within the game. Users strongly protested to the game company, alleging that the guild to which this employee belonged may have gained unfair advantages by monopolizing the information.

In response, the operations team initially announced on the 23rd, "The employee has been excluded from work, their account seized and permanently suspended, and an internal investigation is underway."

According to Kakao Games, the employee in question had been playing "Odin" even before joining the company in August 2021. Afterwards, they joined a top-tier guild in the game and at one point served as the guild leader.

Kakao Games explained that regarding suspicions that some users might have obtained unfair benefits such as prize winnings by leveraging personal connections with employees, "After reviewing the list of prize winners so far, no evidence related to prizes won by specific acquaintances was found."

They added, "We will do our best to prevent recurrence through retraining of service personnel and improvement of monitoring processes."

However, rumors suggesting a connection between this dismissed employee and a current Kakao vice president who was recently disciplined with a three-month suspension for charging 100 million KRW worth of game items on a corporate card were denied as "groundless."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.