Surprising Korea: Your Game Publishing Take-away
For those who accidentally clicks this post, let me introduce myself first before you get into this post.
I am a SUPER heroes geek, was a pro-gamer and hard-core gamer who now has working for multiple international gaming companies over 15 years. While all those years that I have worked for international gaming companies, luckily, I have my own perspective on how game publishers or development studios might take this small country to expand their game service. This article is not about giving any correct answers for you but having different aspects for you a tiny bit worthwhile.
Pretty high ranked even though the population of the country is? Yeah, still amazing! This can be a proof that Korea is still a major market among Asia where might need to contemplate to try out for your gaming publishing. For example, it can be reasonable to consider as a test bed for a major server stress test if you would like to see your server capacities overflowed.
How about PC game market which was the hard-carry of Korea gaming industry up to this level for so long? As you might already know, it's getting downsized dramatically. Since 2012, local development studios have competitively been moving onto developing mobile games.
Next, I would like to talk about what's status of both online and mobile game in Korea. This is an important part to identify and understand Korea's true face via data. As you can see, Korean gaming industry has focused on developing and publishing mobile games ever since as overall online game revenue has decreased and got into stagnation phase since 2012.
Why is Korea surprising as a game market?
Korea game market has been turned into such am interesting and complicated one among Asia regions. And the market is very competitive and getting into the stagnation since 2012 when PC online market had significantly been down its number. Yet, Korea is surprising its unique aspects I believe. First, let's take a look why Korea is still a land of opportunities in terms of game revenues from numbers.
How about PC game market which was the hard-carry of Korea gaming industry up to this level for so long? As you might already know, it's getting downsized dramatically. Since 2012, local development studios have competitively been moving onto developing mobile games.
Considerations
What other aspects of Korea that you would consider tapping into? Here are a couple of background how Korean gaming market has grown up this pace.- General Regulations: While solidifying regulations on game market seems to be a new pitiful trend around the world, Korea is not an exceptional on this part. The government has pushed so hard to categorize game as a drug. You might have to face to some complicated regulations such as shut down policy, Parent Control to implement your game setting, server configuration and website stuffs too.
- Highest(?) speed of the internet: Korea has well-known region where can be adapting top-notch's IT technologies as fast. Diverse and fruitful infrastructure is key reason of why the country has such a diverse in terms of high speed of internet and WI-FI, higher smartphone penetration rate than other Asian countries, higher spending virtual money and now crypto-currency is one of the trends to adapt in.
- eSports: eSports is a mainstream of marketing and strengthening players' retention and acquisition for not only PC online but also mobile and even console games in my opinion. Taking into the considerations second points above, Korea can call themselves like "Pioneer Country of the eSports" as bunch of well-organized broadcasting companies and eSports system, exceptional skilled pro-players and to support eSports booming up since 1999 when internet cafe was all around the world.
- Gaming landscape: It’s fair to say that the market is fiercely competitive with local companies dominating especially mobile game. However, we might not want to miss that mobile games monetization is still in its early stage as local companies has still sat down and try to squeeze how to earn more money and maintain their player base.
Status of both online and mobile game
Next, I would like to talk about what's status of both online and mobile game in Korea. This is an important part to identify and understand Korea's true face via data. As you can see, Korean gaming industry has focused on developing and publishing mobile games ever since as overall online game revenue has decreased and got into stagnation phase since 2012.
Mobile Games
- In global comparison, most revenue is generated in in China (US $16,253m in 2018): As now Chinese mobile games quality has significantly improved and keep improving however, most of the revenue on Korean mobile games still came from in China.
- Revenue in the Mobile Games segment amounts to US $1,644m in 2018.
- User penetration is 37.9% in 2018 and is expected to hit 49.6% by 2022.
- The average revenue per user (ARPU) currently amounts to US $84.05.
Online Games
- Revenue in the Online Games segment amounts to US $690m in 2018.
- User penetration is 18.6% in 2018 and is expected to hit 22.8% by 2022.
- The average revenue per user (ARPU) currently amounts to US $71.73.
- In global comparison, most revenue is generated in in the United States (US $3,477m in 2018): Local game companies normally tries to get their revenues from oversees as local game market has already fiercely competitive.
What strategies you can take to tap into
Staffing: You might want to build a publishing team in which functions are...
- Product Management: This person's key role could be monitoring KPI of the region both acquisition and retention by analyzing data like typical free-to-play key indicator such as DAU / ARPU / AU. And its business model tracking by daily/weekly/monthly basis on normal or special occasions and events. Especially this person needs to have an eagle eye to catch potential cultural issues in-game or event to prevent the content might cause any negative issues happening from community.
- Customer Support: This person's main role and responsibilities could be inbound and outbound to solve players technical issues and then report them to the responsible parties to get the issues fixed.
- Community Management: This person's main job could be managing social media and building a community within loyal players. Could be a plus that if this person can operate several social media to engage.
- Marketing/PR: This person or the agency's focus is that to develop the product and company's position into the market. Public relation can be helpful to deliver another way of positioning of the product or company by releasing editorial PR content with a local gaming specialized media. Marketing can be a front line to position its product to successfully land into the market.
- Localization / QA Management: Localization and QA is a part of the development in terms of tapping a region and they can be a champion to deliver the product's real value to the market. Also ensuring quality of the product would be a key of the roles.
Operations: As a stakeholder in HQ, you would need to focus on and support a Korean regional issue to deal with as follows.
- Knowing your content in quantitative and qualitative way: Korean players between over casual and hard-core players play time is huge like more than you could imagine. They might get bored so quickly and easily before you update new content. It directly goes into your retention rate drops and it could shorten your game's entire life-cycle. Please be sure that your game content is still in good position in both ways.
- Building business model to fit into the market: Some of those companies where monetization plan comes from HQ, they might miss regional specific holidays and occasions to drive their interim revenue. Moreover, there is a unique trend the local companies have tried to hop in DAU by releasing a certain event. You might want to study your region what kind of holiday and events are there to consider turning into your own creative events.
- Communicating transparently: It's not something about you just talk the issue with player in a typical and stereotypical of the way. You better need to present yourself as much as possible to actively communicate issues and announcements transparently and more importantly, on time. The longer you make your Korean staffs await to approval from HQ, the worst community reactions can be generated from the region. Prompt response with an honest tone is the best deeds
- Engaging fun content: You can approach your community being transparent and creative by using some sort of informative and fun style of communication. I understand It will take a little more time to just write down the article, so it cannot apply for every editorial article or development updates. However, I guess its universal, but people don't whole a lot of articles unless it's so important for them. (Wait, are you not going to read this over too?)
- Stepping forward to mitigate regional issue is available: Your operational calendar should be universal to support regional occasion. Transparent communication also needs to be on time. Remember that Korean has a temper to get annoyed very easily especially the stuffs they are so focused on and spending money on it.
Thank you for reading over my humble opinion! If you have any questions or thing to discuss, please contact me at bbladesunny@gmail.com!
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