New and existing employees at South Korean gaming giant Nexon have been given a generous pay boost as part of a drive to attract talent amid the coronavirus outbreak, the company said Monday.

Nexon said it raised the annual starting salary of new developers and other staffers who joined the company starting this year to 50 million won ($44,722) and 45 million won, respectively.

The average starting salary of university graduates at a company with 500 or more employees is 344.7 million won, according the Ministry of Employment and Labor.

For all existing employees, Nexon gave a collective pay raise of 8 million won each. The company will also award higher bonuses this year as a recognition of the employees’ hard work amid the pandemic, it said.

“To leap forward to the world’s top tier company, we decided to strengthen our human resources management through a structural pay raise instead of one-off incentives,” Nexon Korea CEO Lee Jung-hun said.

By Kim Byung-wook (kbw@heraldcorp.com)