Shift Up

Shift Up Corporation is a South Korean video game developer and publisher founded in Seoul on December 2, 2013, by Kim Hyung Tae, previously the art director on Blade and Soul at NCSoft. The company is best known for Goddess of Victory: Nikke, the highest-grossing Korean mobile game globally, and Stellar Blade, the PlayStation 5 exclusive action game that became the best-selling Korean single-player game of all time. Shift Up is publicly traded on the Korean Stock Exchange and operates as Sony Interactive Entertainment’s first Korean second-party developer.

Founding and Mobile Games

Kim Hyung Tae founded Shift Up in December 2013 following his departure from NCSoft, where he had worked as art director and character designer on Blade and Soul. The studio’s early years focused on the South Korean and Japanese mobile markets. Destiny Child, a mobile narrative collector RPG, launched in 2016 and established Shift Up commercially in its home market, providing the revenue base to expand the team and invest in more ambitious projects.

Goddess of Victory: Nikke launched globally in November 2022, published by Level Infinite, a subsidiary of Tencent. The game had generated over six hundred million dollars in revenue by early 2024, making it one of the most commercially successful Korean mobile games ever released and providing the financial foundation that funded Stellar Blade’s development as a AAA console title.

Stellar Blade

Stellar Blade was announced under the working title Project Eve in 2019. Sony Interactive Entertainment came on board as publisher in 2022, converting the game from a planned multiplatform release to a PlayStation 5 exclusive, and Shift Up formalized a second-party developer agreement with Sony in November 2023, becoming the company’s first Korean second-party studio. The game released on PlayStation 5 on April 26, 2024, reaching the top of sales charts in Japan and the United States within weeks of launch.

Stellar Blade follows Eve, a soldier from a space Colony sent to reclaim Earth from alien creatures called Naytibas. Built in Unreal Engine 4, the game drew comparisons to action titles like NieR: Automata and Devil May Cry for its combat system and protagonist design. Critical reception was positive, with a Metacritic user score of 9.2 and eight awards in the PS Blog Game of the Year with participation from over 1.6 million PlayStation users. A Windows version released on June 11, 2025, selling over one million copies in three days, pushing the game’s combined total across both platforms past three million units and making it the best-selling Korean single-player game in history.

Shift Up as a Public Company

Shift Up filed to list on the Korean Stock Exchange in March 2024 and completed its listing that year. The company reported revenue of approximately 294 billion Korean won in 2025 with net income of approximately 191 billion won. Kim Hyung Tae holds approximately 39 percent of the company, with Tencent holding approximately 35 percent following a series of investment rounds. The studio employed 322 people as of December 2024.