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April 04, 2007
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At the PC room Interkahn yesterday in Heukseok-dong, central Seoul, 20 young adults sat in front of computers, mostly playing online games. “College students these days like foreign games, which are larger in scale and have more showy graphics,” said Lim Mi-ae, an employee at Interkahn. She said the most popular game these days is Dungeons and Dragons, a fantasy adventure introduced to Korea early this year. In recent years most Koreans played Lineage, a massive online role playing game developed by NCsoft, or some other Korean online game. More recently foreign games have been quickly eating up the online game pie that Korean firms used to dominate. In fact, most of the blockbuster games, or those with 100,000 or more people playing simultaneously, are foreign. When NCsoft first made the PC-based online game Lineage in 1997, the global game industry watched with interest what would happen, because in Western countries, PC-based games had mostly given way to console video games, such as those for Sony’s PlayStation. However, the game became a huge success, drawing thousands of players into cyberspace. Unlike console games, which had a negative growth rate, Korean online games saw a high growth rate in the 40 percent range in the first couple years. Although Korean online games were thought to be a new growth engine for the nation’s economy, the popularity began to dwindle after three years because new games were not innovative, having similar storylines and game play characteristics to those in Lineage. When the U.S.-based firm Blizzard introduced World of Warcraft game in 2004, it surpassed Lineage in the ranking charts. Last year, FIFA Online, a development between the U.S. firm EA and the Korean firm Neowiz, became a huge hit. “Korean game companies only followed the pattern of previously successful games, instead of putting effort into developing a revolutionary game,” said We Jeong-hyeon, a professor at Chung-Ang University. Now, however, Korean game firms are more threatened as foreign game developers increase investment in online games. Microsoft has spent $2 billion since 2001 to put online functions into its Xbox console. Sony released PS3 last year, which also has online functions. In addition, the Chinese game firm Shanda took over the Korean firm ActozSoft last year for $96 million. Yi In-hwa, a professor at Ewha Womans University, said the Korean game industry is hurt because society mainly views it as leisure, not serious business. “Korea also has to patch up laws to recognize intellectual rights in cyber space,” he said. By Chang Chung-hoon JoongAng Ilbo [wohn@joongang.co.kr] |
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