Korea Braces for Online Games Assault

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2008/05/129_23253.html

Korea Braces for Online Games Assault


Actor Won Bin, left, and Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata duel in a virtual tennis match at the local launch of the Nintendo Wii held on April 14. Nintendo had low expectations on the home video game player’s sales in South Korea, where people prefer playing games at Internet cafes with friends but sales of Wii here have been brisk since its inception. / Korea Times Photo by Kim Dong-ho

By Tim Alper
Contributing Writer

This week marks the overdue release in Korea of the Nintendo Wii games console. The Wii, which has been on sale in the United States since the middle of last year, has a groundbreaking motion-sensitive controller than allows gamers to use its controller as a baseball bat, a gun or even a boxing glove.

However, despite the latest Japanese arrival to these shores, expect little in the way of a reaction from Korean gamers, who will probably spend the best part of this week with other PC gamers in their local PC Bang, slaying dragons or killing zombies online.

Korea is awash with computer games, but this country is unique in that for the most part, gamers here spurn consoles like Sony's PlayStation or Microsoft's Xbox in favor of games that can be played on PCs.

MMORPG is quite a mouthful as an acronym, but what it stands for is even harder to say ― Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. While the rest of the world is slowly waking up to the concept of playing games on PCs with (or against) thousands of people they have never met, Koreans have been at it for years.

Internationally, though, the phenomenal success of online games elsewhere - like World of Warcraft (WoW) and Second Life, have wooed and surprised the world, as the most unlikely of computer game players have emerged as WoW fans.

The international media marveled at the story of Anshe Chung, the first millionaire to have made a fortune from land existing only in cyberspace.

Computer games, as a concept, were born in the 1970s, but in the space of 30 or so years they have grown into one of the biggest and most profitable digital commodities.

Fortunately for the Korean economy, producers here wasted no time in developing computer game technology. However, rather than following Japan and the U.S.A. down the path of developing games for specialized consoles, Koreans threw their lot in with developing titles for PCs.

One of the fastest countries to commercialize high-speed Internet, it made sense for Korea to invest in games that were playable online with others rather than that relied on individual users against the computer.

Jeon Chan-woong is the CEO and founder of Joymax, which makes the Silkroad Online games. He explains, ``The player vs. computer or player vs. player format is static and dull. MMORPGs allow for players to compete and collaborate in so many different ways.''

Many would also argue that this dynamic stems in some part form Korea's intense sense of community. Indeed, go down to any PC room in Korea and you will see groups of teenagers babbling instructions and comments to each other as they join in team efforts to rid the world of a plague of mutant insects or take on a rival e-soccer team that consists of 11 players and 11 PCs.

And though their babble is incomprehensible to the uninitiated, in the world of Lineage, Sudden Attack or Best Eleven, it makes perfect sense. To the developers of such titles, it makes financial sense ― and a lot of it.

However, as the world starts to tire of consoles, the big international hitters in the computer game industry are starting to set their sights on the MMORPG market, as they see the popularity that online games are enjoying in countries like Korea and China.

Japanese and American developers, like of Konami and Electronic Arts, are starting to invest in the development of PC games when once they would have sneered at such a notion.

Korean company Ntreev makes MMORPG games and the only Korean-developed Wii game so far ― the Pangya golf series. They fully expect an imminent online PC game assault.

According to them, ``Korean online games are still the best, but many Japanese and American companies, with their excellent experience in producing console games, will play a big role in the future. They are already using their expertise to produce online games that will be hitting the market in the next few months. There will probably be an influx of games from there that might or might not be up to current standards, but over the next few years, this will turn into fierce competition.''

Seo Soo-kil is chief executive at Wemade, which makes the Legends of Mir online games.

He says that Wemade sees a different solution to the unstoppable onslaught of big-hitting games giants from the United States and Japan. ``We need to go global. In fact, we need to go global quckly in order to stay afloat. That means on every level. At Wemade, our boardroom meetings are held in English and we are giving our staff free English lessons so that we can communicate and network with people outside Korea.''

Korean game manufacturers are quickly realizing that although the current domestic market is saturated with Korean products, a foreign invasion is only moments away. But for games to really be a hit now, they now need to have international appeal. Korean games makers need to globalize their product, but not in order to compete with the Americans and Japanese ― they need to do so just to survive.

Seo says ``We can't go into direct competition with companies like Microsoft ― we do not have the financial muscle to take on even a single department of a company like that. That is exactly why we have to develop products that are global and practical.''

Ntreev envisages a case of survival of the fittest for Korean MMORPG makers. A spokesman explains ``There will be a market restructuring where only the developers with the right tools will rise to the occasion.''