泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌
[A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]
Harsh advice for local game publishers
I loved Hong Kong action films such as A Better Tomorrow, Casino Raiders, The Killer during my school days. In the early 90s, Hong Kong pictures were pretty fun and their movie characters were all awesome. Schoolboys tried to look cool with a matchstick in their mouth like Chow Yun-fat and Leslie Cheung even appeared in the domestic commercial film on the small screen. However, the Hong Kong cinemas had seen their best days in ten years due to repeated production of popular-formula genre and a few top-rated actors appeared in several movies.
Many people say that Korea's gaming industry is struggling nowadays. Top-ranked games have remained the same in order and newly-released games haven't done especially well. Even good performances of some of them are minuscule compared to those of the greatest hits in the past. In such conditions, the majority of investors suffered a great loss and they were reluctant to make any fresh investments in the video games, which has caused a vicious cycle in the industry.
Most readers probably know the situation in the national gaming industry. The reason why I mentioned the widely-known facts is to criticize irresponsible actions of local big game publishers which have prolonged the vicious cycle.
Recently, it seems that the number of bankrupt companies may surpass the number of newly-released games. However, data shows that the market has become bigger. Then where did the increased game revenue go? The only winners must be the big publishers. They have earned consistent profits from the minority of games remaining in the upper ranks during the past few years. Netmarble is said to have 1 trillion won in revenue and sales of Gamevil and Com2uS is known to reach half of it. I don't want to take an issue with corporate profits. However, the large publishers have many game developers into the jaws of death for their own hands now. A barely completed game under tough circumstances due to poor investment is like a lifeline for them. It's nothing short of a matter of life and death. The big game publishers don't find out new ways to market those games which are less effective than existing profitable games. Frankly speaking, most major distributors don't take risks to conduct a huge marketing campaign because they won't suffer a serious loss if they make sales as much as up-front advance payment including down payment, minimum guarantee, license fee, or development cost, etc. The neglected games disappear with the developers after barely making money to meet the publishers' costs not even having a chance to be loved for a long time by users. Publishers may prefer the cost-effective favored product than a new game with an unconvincing possibility when it comes to profitability. However, there is nothing forever. If they abandon potential developers for short-term profits, game makers cannot survive in the market and even game studios, that managed to survive the fierce competition, won't like to work with those vicious distributors. Video games are created by men not robots. Game developers cannot pull together with business partners who they don't trust with. Without consistent cooperation from a longer-term perspective to support developers' potentiality, there is no bright future for domestic publishers. I hope that local publishers won't repeat the same failure as Hong Kong pictures in the early 90s.
※ This is from Kyunghyang Games column by 泥中蟠龍 since September 2013.
(http://www.khgames.co.kr)
Translation by Kim Ki-hui
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