Korea has announced a new five year plan to support their local video game industry.
As reported by Korea Times, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism intends to expand their game industry’s business in console games worldwide by 2028. They will work with smaller game developers and publishers to get their games finished, and published on PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo platforms.
This may seem like an unserious agenda, but Korea has demonstrated an aptitude for spreading their soft power via cultural imports. This very same culture ministry invested in their entertainment industry since the 1990s, creating the conditions that we now see today, where Korean pop music, TV shows, and movies, have become ubiquitous around the world.
Another huge factor in this is the Korean video game industry itself. It may seem that Stellar Blade and Lies of P are only recent imports, but Korean game companies have been trying to break through to the West for decades. Around seven years ago, Nexon tried with Ghost In The Shell Standalone Complex – First Assault, and over a decade before that, they imported their big Korean hits, MapleStory and Dungeon & Fighter.
The Korean game industry is one of the biggest in the world, generating $ 16 billion in 2022 alone. However, most of the industry has been making games nearly exclusively for Korea, and mostly in mobile and PC.
While Korean game companies thrived in their home market for decades, they have reached a point where they have, quite literally, tapped out that market. There is now so many games coming out that Korean gamers themselves don’t have time to play, with all the other games they’re already playing. While some industry insiders dispute this assessment, they will likely agree that Korean developers have long wanted to expand worldwide.
As of this reporting, the Korean game industry only has 1.5 % share in the global market. In spite of the talk of mobile games killing consoles one day, as of right now, Korea sees the 40 % of gamers in America and Europe playing on console, and the missed opportunity they have there.
But, aside from Stellar Blade and Lies of P, PUBG was discreetly developed and published by a Korean game company for years now, in Krafton. That’s the same Krafton who founded Striking Distance Studios in America, in the hopes that their The Callisto Protocol will break them through to consoles in the West.
So it may only be visible now, but Korea’s cultural invasion of the console game industry worldwide has been a long time coming. We already know of some more bigger projects in the near future, such as NCSoft’s Project LLL and Pearl Abyss’ Crimson Desert. Don’t be surprised if the likes of NCSoft and Netmarble become as famous worldwide as Blackpink and Bong Joon-Ho, or for that matter, as much as Nintendo and Activision.
