Korean game studio Shift Up has announced plans to launch an IPO.
As reported by The Korea Economic Daily, the company hopes to raise $ 313 million by selling 7,250,000 in the Korean stock market. If the IPO stock price goes up to the top, it could raise Shift Up’s market cap to $ 2.5 billion. That would immediately make it one of the biggest game companies in its native Korea, only below Krafton, Netmarble, and NCSOFT.
Now, these three companies are big publishers in Korea and around the world, as they each publish PUBG, The King of Fighters All Star, and Guild Wars 2, respectively. However, Shift Up is not interested in becoming a publisher itself.
Instead, Shift Up will invest the IPO profits back into making games, and they intend to make new original games instead of licensing famous IPs.
In this IPO announcement, Shift Up announced that their PlayStation 5 exclusive Stellar Blade sold more than one million copies. It made 15.8 Korean billion won since its launch, which sounds impressive until you learn that its mobile title Goddess of Victory: Nikke made 15.5 billion won in just the last month.
Shift Up no doubt benefited from the association and promotion with Sony for Stellar Blade, but it’s more likely that they got to this IPO from the cumulative profits from Goddess of Victory: Nikke and their other mobile gacha titles.
Shift Up has expressed interest in bringing Stellar Blade to other platforms, at least PC. They also expressed an interest in making a Stellar Blade sequel. But a successful IPO may put them in a position where they could explore making other games to find success beyond mobile and PlayStation 5.
For example, their colleagues over at Round 8 Studios found success making a maso-core Soulslike of their own in Lies of P. Shift Up did not utilize their experience making a shooter in Goddess of Victory: Nikke for the action game Stellar Blade. That game is already on PC, but they could see success making that a multiplatform release across PlayStation, Xbox, and the Switch.
As we have championed many times, Korea’s game industry is eager to expand around the world, and we should certainly welcome their efforts. Unlike other emerging gaming markets, Korea is a multimillion dollar industry all on its own. That’s led to a highly developed video game industry, with a lot of talented emerging studios.
Really, Korea has managed to keep studios like Shift Up and Round 8 to themselves for way too long. Shift Up’s and Round 8’s successes are great for them, but their breakout moments could also open the floodgates for other Korean developers to surprise us with their talents in the near future.
