泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌 [A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity] Hero Maker and 10,000-Hour Rule

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌

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

 

Hero Maker and 10,000-Hour Rule

March. 01. 2018.

 

There is a Hero Maker, one of many webtoons—an animated cartoon or series of comic strips published online—on a South Korean online platform Naver. It has been serialized for 12 years since it began in November 2006. Hero Maker is the longest carrying webtoons on the platform after The Sound of Your Heart, Naver Webtoon's most famous work, which was first uploaded in September the same year. And I've never missed to read it from its first episode. Working on something for a long time is not only very difficult but meaningful.

 

Recently, many top-rated new games are found on the domestic game charts. For example, there is Lineage M: it may not fall into this category, Overhit, Tera M, and AxE: they had just come out, and Black Desert Mobile: it was released this year. The big-budget RPG games, which were released amid high expectations, are all doing great. On the other hand, several long-standing top-ranked games have maintained their position since they were released over 2-3 years ago. For instance, five-year-old Everybody's Marble and four-year-old Seven Knights and Sumonnor's war: Sky Arena still occupy a higher rank. Also, there are FPS Special Soldier, idle RPG Endless Frontier, and old school gaming Crusaders Quest.

 

Providing game content on a continuing revenue model for a long time means a lot in two ways. First, the long-term game services signify that a game development team has the necessary skills to deal with the diverse situation: e.g. updating, patches, recovering a hacked account, and in-game events, etc. Customer churn inevitably occurs when they don't manage crises or unexpected difficulties properly. Problem-solving ability is one of the development team's best assets. Second, users have lots of things-to-do within a game thanks to long-time accumulated content in the game.

 

An early game user has nothing to do anymore after a long time since its launch. A developer needs to update the game for a variety of timely content so that the user keeps playing the game. The periodical update makes the game provide richer content to its existing customers, whereas, it can be a high barrier to attract new users. Therefore, a steady-selling-title game developer tries to come up with a solution thinking about both sides. And users are very excited about its new game which will be expected to show a good outcome.

 

You may hear of the idea of 10,000-Hour Rule. Whatever you do, 10,000-hour efforts lead to big consequences. Supposing that you spend four hours a day except for the weekend—total 20 hours a week—, it takes about 10 years. The rule is still relevant although a recent study found that there are big differences among individuals. The development teams, as mentioned above, have already spent over 10,000-hours with deliberate practice. I pay tribute to the long-established teams and the webtoon artist of Hero Maker. Also, as a columnist, I expect to clock up 10,000 hours in ten years.

 

 

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

(http://www.khgames.co.kr)

 

Translation by Kim Ki-hui