VARCO
NC AI's generative 3D, sound and voice tools with open Korean models
Overview
VARCO is the generative-AI brand of NC AI (spun off from NCSOFT, now NC): VARCO 3D and Sound for game content, TTS, chat translation and fashion images via API, plus open VARCO-VISION and Llama-VARCO models. Free plan of 2,000 credits; Plus $20 a month.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 1 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- 1 concurrent 3D generation, latest 3D model
- Limited remeshing and PBR
- VARCO Sound with 20-second video input
- 10 concurrent 3D generations, multiview 3D
- Unlimited remeshing and PBR
- Sound desktop app, unlimited Audio Agent
- Commercial use
- Everything in Plus
- 30 concurrent 3D generations
- Tailored solutions
- High-volume generation support
- 3D, Sound, Voice/TTS, Translate, SyncFace, Art Fashion APIs
- Per-call credit rates
Use cases
What you can produce with VARCO
- Text- and image-to-3D game assets (VARCO 3D 2.0)
- Sound effects and music from text, image or video (VARCO Sound)
- Text-to-speech and voice APIs
- Chat translation including Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian and Tagalog
- Open VARCO-VISION 2.0 (14B, 1.7B) and Llama-VARCO-8B models
- VARCO LLM 2.0 on AWS SageMaker
ASEAN Perspective
VARCO in Southeast Asia
VARCO's practical ASEAN relevance today is limited — its language roster covers Korean, English, Chinese, and Japanese but excludes Bahasa Indonesia, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese, or Filipino. That said, NCSOFT already has a Southeast Asia presence via a joint venture with Vietnamese tech unicorn VNG Corp, and the VARCO LLM 2.0 multilingual expansion signals the roadmap direction. For APAC-focused enterprises in Singapore, Malaysia, or Indonesia, VARCO Vision 2.0's open-weight models are worth evaluating for document OCR and bilingual KO/EN workflows, but builders requiring local-language fluency should pair it with a Southeast Asian fine-tune or look to regional alternatives such as SeaLLM or Sailor.
VARCO has grown from NCSOFT's in-house language model into a practical content-production suite, and the old picture of a quote-only, Korean-only product no longer holds: there are public plans from $20 a month, English documentation, and translation that covers Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian and Tagalog. VARCO 3D and the newly launched VARCO Sound are aimed squarely at game developers, with a Unity plugin and commercial rights on paid plans. Its open models are useful for Korean vision-language work, though the strongest are non-commercial. NC AI lost its place in Korea's sovereign-AI programme in January 2026, and independent reviews are absent. Worth trying on the free plan for 3D and audio asset work.
What we found
VARCO is the generative-AI brand of NC AI, the subsidiary that the Korean games company NCSOFT — renamed NC in March 2026 — spun off in February 2025. It began in August 2023 as NCSOFT's own Korean-English language model and is now a family of tools for content production. VARCO 3D turns text or images into game-ready 3D models; its 2.0 model, shipped in July 2026, builds an asset in up to three minutes, and NC AI reports a 41% gain over version 1.1 on the Uni3D benchmark, its own measurement. VARCO Sound, out of beta since September 2026, generates sound effects and music from text, images or video, with an audio agent, multitrack output, a desktop app and a Unity plugin. Other services cover text-to-speech, chat translation that includes Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian and Tagalog, face syncing, a content filter and fashion images, all with English documentation. NC AI says VARCO Voice was named a best use case at the ITU's AI for Good summit in 2026.
NC AI also publishes open models: VARCO-VISION 2.0 vision-language models at 14 billion and 1.7 billion parameters under a non-commercial CC BY-NC licence, and Llama-VARCO-8B under Meta's Llama 3.1 licence. VARCO LLM 2.0 runs on AWS SageMaker for $0.70 or $1.30 per host hour, while an older 13B model is free. NC AI's larger VAETKI models are a separate line. In January 2026 NC AI was dropped from Korea's sovereign foundation-model programme, and it now describes its focus as physical and industry AI.
The VARCO Game AI site sells monthly plans: a free plan of 2,000 credits with one 3D job at a time and limited remeshing; Plus at $20 for 10,000 credits, commercial use and ten concurrent 3D jobs; Premium at $100 for 50,000 credits; and Enterprise on request. API credit packs start at $5, and extra credits cannot be added to a plan.
We found no independent user reviews or benchmarks.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
Notable facts
- VARCO was the first large language model ever launched by a game company in South Korea, beating other Korean gaming giants to market in August 2023.
- The name VARCO is a backronym: 'Via AI, Realize your Creativity and Originality' — reflecting NCSOFT's creative-content roots in Lineage and Blade & Soul.
- VARCO Vision 2.0's 1.7B model is designed to run on consumer smartphones and PCs, bringing bilingual Korean-English multimodal AI to on-device deployment.
- NCSOFT established its AI research department as far back as 2011 — over a decade before VARCO's public launch — making its move into LLMs a long-planned pivot rather than an overnight bet.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including VARCO's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with VARCO unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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