Korea has become a surprisingly noteworthy region for video games lately, and it’s not because of PUBG.
In the last two years, we have been seeing the release of new successful console games from Korea, such as Lies of P, Stellar Blade, and The First Descendant. While Korea has a gigantic local market for mobile free-to-play games alone, these games we are referring to now are made for consoles, and two of them are full retail titles.
We have seen even older attempts by Korean studios to break through to the West before. Once upon a time, The First Descendant’s publisher, Nexon, bet big on a licensed online shooter named Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex – First Assault Online. More recently, Pearl Abyss made some waves with the stunning graphics of their MMO Black Desert Online.
But even that isn’t the full story, as we know that many more games, from different studios and publishers, are on the way. NCSoft’s Project LLL promises a truly unique experience from anything any other studio anywhere else in the world has made.
The Korean government itself has announced plans to help fund their games industry’s efforts to go global on consoles, and by that we mean they will be backing smaller studios to bring their games to PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo platforms.
But on a smaller level, the game studios themselves sought to make new games for consoles, leaving their mobile roots. So why did they do that?
As shared by GameDeveloper, the belated magazine GameInformer had a roundtable interview with several Korean developers. While there’s no clear consensus among them, the bigger picture that emerges is that they are seeing bigger interest for console games, in their native Korea as much as around the world. For example, Round8’s CEO Jason Park, who made Lies of P multiplatform and global, stated that there is a limit to how many Korean gamers buy on PC and consoles.
Shift Up’s CEO Kim Hyung-Tae, was also the director for Stellar Blade. He chose to partner with Sony to make Blade a PS5 exclusive, but also have them pay for a global release. He corroborates that most of the game’s one million buyers were outside Korea.
We had written before about the long running hypothesis that the Korean mobile game industry has become saturated, with its most dedicated players too busy with existing games to play new ones. Hyung-Tae believes those mobile gamers are also older gamers, as they are the ones with more money to spend on them. That also created a situation where those older games, designed for older gamers, struggle to entice new gamers. So they’re stuck catering to their older whales.
Pearl Abyss America CEO Jeonghee Jin belives that there’s still a chance for growth in consoles in Korea. Nonetheless, Pearl Abyss joins their peers in going global, and really, they got there before Round8 and Shift Up.
The rest of this roundtable can still be read if you can acquire the last edition of GameInformer. What we can say here, though, is that this new Korean ambition to break through to games worldwide, might have as much coming into it as their very successful efforts to import kpop, Korean movies and TV shows, to a broader worldwide audience. They literally made PUBG. The next big games revolution could be coming from that 3rd East Asian country.
