Smilegate aims at becoming top global game company

By Yoon Sung-won

Smilegate is committed to growing into a truly global game company that can provide unprecedented entertainment for gamers worldwide, its CEOs Andrew Yang and Ji Won-gil said in a recent interview.

After an unexpectedly huge hit with the shooting game “Crossfire” in China in 2009, Smilegate surprised fans again with its latest online game project “Lost Ark.”

“When I first joined Smilegate in November 2011, the business was expanding but the organizational process was not settled yet. So I started by reorganizing the whole system of the company,” said Smilegate Entertainment CEO Yang, who is also the chief financial officer of the group (CFO).

Smilegate is headquartered in Pangyo, Gyeonggi Province.

“The company moved to a new building in Pangyo to integrated offices that were separated into four workplaces. We also introduced an enterprise resource planning and an electronic document approval system. This was the right time, which we lacked during the rapid growth, to enhance corporate efficiency to become a major global enterprise,” he said.

Established as a small game startup in 2002, Smilegate turned to the Chinese market after a series of domestic failures.

Under the partnership with Chinese game publisher Tencent, Smilegate launched Crossfire, which recorded 6 million simultaneous logins, a key index to evaluate popularity, in China alone. The record is an unprecedented figure worldwide.

Crossfire currently has over 400 million subscribers globally, and has generated more than 1 trillion won in sales for the company.

Thanks to the title’s popularity, Smilegate posted 376 billion won in sales and 255 billion won in operating profit in 2013. “A team of Smilegate employees stayed in China to handle detailed aspects of game localization from the country’s computer and network infrastructure for gaming to Chinese people’s love for the color red and oriental dragons,” Yang said.

“Cooperation with Tencent was especially useful when we faced China’s regulatory barriers. The country prohibits a foreign game firm to directly publish a title there. This regulation is still intact even under the free trade agreement between China and Korea.”

Yang emphasized that the company always considers China when preparing a new game.

“We will not exclude China for any game business in the future and will not develop or publish a title that is not likely to succeed in the country,” he said.

The CFO added that the company currently does not plan a public offering of Smilegate affiliates.

Adventure and expedition

Gamers worldwide reacted enthusiastically when the company unveiled the new online action role-playing game “Lost Ark” on Nov. 11, one week before the global game expo G-Star 2014 in Busan.

Two Lost Ark trailers posted on the company’s official Youtube account posted more than 1.2 million hits.

Local game fans lined up to watch the game’s video preview at the G-Star show where many compared the game with NCSOFT’s online game “Lineage Eternal,” which is expected to come out by 2016.

“Lineage Eternal is a well-made game. But I think the game aims at providing different entertainment to Lost Ark,” said Smilegate RPG CEO Ji Won-gil, who headed the development of Lost Ark.

“Alongside live action features from 18 types of character, we designed Lost Ark as a game with various content that provide adventures and expeditions. This means gamers can travel in an extensive world while discovering unknown regions or encountering random events,” he said. “We want to avoid repetitive, boring game play that many gamers are already accustomed to.”

Unlike Lineage Eternal, which will be launched on both online and mobile platforms, Lost Ark is likely to have community functions only on a mobile platform, Ji said.

“It is not important to provide all the game content on mobile. We want to provide only what gamers really what on the mobile platform,” he said.

Ji said the development team will conduct a focus group testing and a closed beta test in Korea this year and is planning to speed up a global launch, which will follow the roll-out in Korea.

“We have received unexpectedly heated responses from overseas gamers, particularly those from English-speaking countries, about Lost Ark,” Ji said. “China is an important market for Smilegate. So it is likely that we will launch the game in China right after Korea. We are also mulling over how to optimize the game’s graphic level for the global market.”