Game developers eye mobile market

By Cho Mu-hyun

Korean game developers are rushing to make games for mobile phones.

In the United States the dominating game platform has been consoles, whereas in Korea the desktop computer has reigned supreme for over a decade due to the prevalence of Internet cafes beginning in the late 1990s.

According to the Korea Communications Commission, there will be 30 million smartphone users by the end of August and this number will continue to increase.

Major game makers Nexon and NCsoft are adjusting their focus to reflect the changes in people’s lifestyles that now revolve around wireless devices.

“Our current daily life and atmosphere is completely becoming a mobile era,” said NCsoft CEO Kim Taek-jin. “Games must break the boundaries of only being played on personal computers to become a platform that interconnects the joy between users.”

NCsoft, known for popular online role-playing titles such as Lineage and Aion, started investing in mobile projects even before the dawn of smartphones in 2008. The prior services were mostly supplementary features to games, but the company is at present creating a new game specifically for wireless devices, said an NCsoft spokesman.

Online games that are massive in scale require huge amounts of memory and more advanced graphic processing technology. This was challenging to render in previous mobile devices.

Consequently the development of cloud computing, which stores data in a server rather than hardware and graphic processors made for computing like those of Nvidia’s Geforce GRID, now wireless as an accessible avenue for mobile games.

“Only a few years back, it was difficult for mobile games to grow fast like the success of Web-based online games (played here on personal computers) due to the insufficient quality of hardware and lack of an open network,” said a Nexon spokeswoman. “But the emergence of smartphones that match personal computers in capability motivates us to invest large amounts in the mobile game market.”

Nexon plans to release eight titles made exclusively for touch screen devices by the second half of this year. “We will actively push games that are our intellectual property and strengthen our mobile business in both domestic and overseas markets.”

Korea’s largest game maker released Kart Rider Rush Plus, an Android smartphone version of the company’s popular Kart Rider, in June which marked 2 million downloads within four weeks.

Besides games firms, more and more businesses from telecommunications companies to Internet content providers, are offering channels or platforms making games available on mobile devices. Mobile carrier LG Uplus launched a platform called C-Games. Mobile messenger service provider Kakao Talk released its long awaited game platform in collaboration with WeMade Entertainment on Monday.

“Game developers can’t help but invest in games specified for mobile devices as the market expands further every day,” said Kim Min-kyu, a cultural content professor at Ajou University over the phone. “But the truth is, though we differentiate the mobile from the desktop game market, as technology advances, the boundaries between wireless and wired devices are blurring as platform services become compatible and unrestricted.”

Kim said titles for smartphones will be the start. In the future, it will be assumed that games will be available on all devices that have Internet connectivity.

The professor said one of the aspects to watch for in the future was whether online-role playing games become playable on smartphones. It may take some time, but will be “immensely interesting for gamers.”