Hound13

Hound13 is the South Korean studio behind DragonSword. For the Western release, Hound13 is self-publishing on Steam under the retitled DragonSword: Awakening brand.

At a Glance

Founding and Lineage

Hound13 was founded in September 2014 by veterans who had worked on Dragon Nest at Eyedentity Games, including CEO Park Jung-sik. That lineage is directly relevant to DragonSword: Awakening. The studio is not a Dragon Nest successor contractually, but the combat DNA, specifically the switch-action system and fast combo-heavy feel, comes out of that same design tradition, which is why the studio is often described as a spiritual successor to Dragon Nest.

Hundred Soul

Before DragonSword, Hound13's flagship release was Hundred Soul, a mobile action RPG that launched in Korea in January 2019 and rolled out globally through 2019 and 2020. Hundred Soul is where the studio developed and shipped the switch-action combat style that DragonSword: Awakening now evolves into an open-world action RPG. Global Hundred Soul service has since ended; the Korean service continues under the title Hundred Soul: The Last Savior.

Investment

In 2021, Garena invested roughly 20 billion KRW (around 17.5 million US dollars at the time) into Hound13 to scale up work on DragonSword. Garena did not take publishing rights under that round.

The Webzen Split and Steam Self-Publishing

The original DragonSword launched in South Korea on January 21, 2026, published through Webzen under a free-to-play model. That publishing arrangement ran into issues when Webzen failed to pay the remaining minimum guarantee tied to the deal, which Hound13 has publicly cited as roughly 30 billion KRW unpaid. On February 13, 2026, Hound13 formally terminated the Webzen contract.

On April 10, 2026, Hound13 announced the self-published Steam rework. The studio renamed the game to DragonSword: Awakening, opened a Steam page and YouTube channel, and announced a July 2026 release with a demo at Steam Next Fest in June.

Public dev-team communications for the Steam relaunch run primarily through Steam News, the official Discord, and YouTube livestreams. Producer Jang Yun-jin, who goes by JYJ, has been the face of the gameplay livestreams in particular: the May 7 stream ran live commentary on early gameplay clips, and the May 22 follow-up stream walked through both the demo build and longer combat sections from the full game, with Korean voice and English chat moderation. A community manager handles the English-side communication on stream and in the AMA recaps.

What Hound13 is Not

Hound13 is sometimes confused with other Korean mobile action RPG studios because the space is crowded. Two specific clarifications are worth making:

• HIT (Heroes of Incredible Tales) is not a Hound13 game. HIT was made by NAT Games and published by Nexon in 2015.

• Dragon Raja mobile is not a Hound13 game. Dragon Raja was developed by the Chinese studio Archosaur Games.

Hound13's own public ledger is Hundred Soul and DragonSword, with Project M as the in-development single-player PC and console title.

Who Leads the Project

Two names carry the public messaging, and they are not interchangeable. Park Jung-sik, who signs his posts as Ropie, is both the chief executive of Hound13 and the director of DragonSword: Awakening; he wrote the launch announcement and the studio's statement after the July 2026 court ruling. Jang Yun-jin, known publicly as JYJ, is the producer, and it was JYJ who posted the launch-delay apology and fronted the developer livestreams, the roadmap stream, and the final preview stream on July 16, 2026.

The Cost of the Pivot

Rebuilding a live-service title into a package game came out of a much smaller studio than the one that started it. Hound13 went from roughly 150 staff to 46 across the dispute and the rework. Jang Yun-jin has said the compressed schedule left almost no room for new systems, and that the team had to work out quickly what was genuinely achievable in the time it had. What survived the cut was the action layer: Park Jung-sik describes the studio's consistent priority, before and after the pivot, as the core feel of the combat.

The gamble paid off in the short term. DragonSword: Awakening sold 200,000 copies in its first week and peaked at 23,000 concurrent players. By August 11, 2026 the studio reported that the game had passed 300,000 copies sold and one million wishlists, and it has committed to four free post-launch Heroes and console versions off the back of that.