泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌
[A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]
Past, present, and future of Steam (Part 1)
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, a video game made by Krafton (known as Bluehole Studio until April 2015), which is a South Korean video game developer, has recently come into focus. The company is best known for TERA, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) since it was established in 2007.
The reason PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is receiving the major spotlight is that not only because it is a PC platform-based Third-person shooter (TPS) paying full price for a version of the game but also because it has been high in the rank since it was released in Steam, a video game digital distribution platform.
Few national PC gaming developers target only the local market because its domestic market is relatively small in scale compared with other game platforms. The size of the PC gaming market is a lot smaller than the other ones even if it includes overseas markets. It lost its ground to stand on at home over the past several years in the face of competition with online and mobile games. Furthermore, users can hardly find full-paid PC games since in-app purchases (IAP) and selling virtual goods have been widely popularized throughout the online and mobile games. However, the biggest cause of the attention is that this is the first time the local PC game has brought big achievements on the global game platform Steam.
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds totaled over 60 billion dollars in revenue selling over 2 million copies of 29.99 dollars a piece for less than two months since it launched in March 2017. Moreover, it used Steam's early access before the official release. And the result was the top-level record among numerous other released video games in the Steam gaming platform in both South Korea and abroad, which is raising users' expectations of the official version that is scheduled to go on sale in August this year. Alpha-access is a funding model in the video game platform by which players can purchase and enjoy a game in the making for user feedback and suggestions.
The reason I elaborate on the Krafton-made video game is that Battlegrounds showed its potential for the international expansion of domestic PC games through the distribution channel Steam. For this reason, I'd like to talk about past, present, and future of Steam which is unfamiliar to local game developers yet.
I'm not sure, but this article will be of help to small and medium-sized game companies considering release their game on Steam.
※ 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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