泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌 _ Maximilien Ringelmann or Synergy effect

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌

[A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]

 

Maximilien Ringelmann or Synergy effect

 

We usually say that we expect the synergy effect when we do something together between groups or individual members. The term synergy is derived from the Greek word for synergos meaning "working together". Synergy—synergistic effect—, as defined in Cambridge dictionary, is "the combined power of a group of things when they are working together that is greater than the total power achieved by each working separately“.

But can we have all the good things from working together? Isn't there the worst possibility? You can easily see many loveless couples around you although they wanted to create a happy family with their partner before they were married. If the cooperation between the two produces good results all the time, there are no marriages ended in divorce.

Maximilien Ringelmann, a French agricultural engineer, conducted tug-of-war to measure the value of an individual's contribution to the group. Reportedly, the experiment was originally done to verify the numerical analysis of the synergy effect. However, the result of the experiment was surprising. You can think of the strength of an individual member as 100% and the results vary depending on the number of the player: the two-player team used 93% of strength; three-player team used 85%; 8-player team used just 64%. Ultimately it means that the strengths of the 8-player team are not much bigger than the strengths of 5-player team whose members each use their 100% strength. This is called the Ringelmann Effect named after Maximilien Ringelmann.

Gamevil acquired Com2uS, one of its main competitors, on October 4, 2013, which was pretty shocking news back then and remember that I also wrote about the big deal. Stock prices of the two video game companies drastically went up for the last one year. It's been one year and four months since the announcement of the equity acquisition. The current position of the companies, creating a synergy effect, totally different now compared to one year earlier. Just a year ago, the total amount of the two company's market capitalization didn't reach either of the two company's current total value of the share.

One of the hottest issues this week is probably a battle over management control between Nexon and NCSoft. Many people expected the two prominent firms to create synergy when they heard the news because both are South Korea's leading video game publisher and developer respectively. It made the video game world very excited about amazing synergy when the two top-notch companies with the different-style genre would work together. But, two and a few months later, the results fell far short of everybody's expectations. No one can predict the result of the feud over control of the group. I only expect them to reach an amicable agreement as soon as possible to produce a greater effect. I don't want to use this case as the example of Ringelmann Effect writing a column a few years later.

※ This is from Kyunghyang Games column by 泥中蟠龍 since September 2013.

   (http://www.khgames.co.kr)

    Translation by Kim Ki-hui