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

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌 [A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity] Minimum wage & divide and rule

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌

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

 

Minimum wage & divide and rule

February. 12. 2018.

The minimum wage has been in the news a lot since the beginning of the year. Following the news articles, fewer people now have jobs, self-employed persons have suffered a considerable loss, and the foundation of smaller enterprises—that accounts for over 90% of employment in the market—is giving way due to the minimum wage increases. And they also say that convenience stores will continue to shut down and many people will lose their part-time jobs.

 

Frankly speaking, I just want to throw the mouse on my computer monitor while I'm reading those ridiculous articles which make me blow my top. In the case of South Korea, the average salary of regular workers is based on 22 days a month. Supposing that an employee works 9 hours a day, the numbers add up to 198 hours a month. The worker would receive 1,490,940 won a month based on 7,530 won: the raised minimum wage at the moment. Therefore, we can see that the negative articles say that about 1.5 million won is too high for working people who spend their considerable length of time at work. I believe that convenience stores would be mentioned most when it comes to the minimum wage. If a part-time employee at a 24-hour convenience store works 24/7, the store staff can work a total of 8,760 hours a year. The store worker will additionally receive 9.3 million won a year, reflecting 1,060 won—the recent increased hourly wage. For example, GS25, the convenience store chain in South Korea, has about 11,000 stores throughout the nation. So the second-most popular convenience store chain has to cover the additional 1 trillion won. The company's headquarters generated sales of 7.4 trillion won posting 270 billion won in net profit in fiscal 2016.

 

I get mad at the media that creates these part-time employees vs. convenience store owners sentiment aggravating their difficulties by harping on the minimum wage. Small and medium-sized businesses and self-employed people account for 90% of all private-sector employment, whereas conglomerates tend to save a few hundred billion won a year with fairly low employment rates. Samsung keeps on rolling getting its supplies from the cheap sources based on low-wage earners with annual sales and operating profits volume exceeding 200 trillion won and 30 trillion won, respectively, although the media criticizes the government's policy day after day saying that smaller enterprises will go bankrupt due to workers who get increased monthly salary from 1.3 million won to 1.5 million won. I've never seen an article that smaller businesses account for 90% of employment when the Press sides with major companies insisting that the government needs to focus on supporting them for job creation.

You may know "divide and conquer". The divide and conquer is gaining and maintaining power by breaking up larger concentrations of power into pieces that individually have less power than the one implementing the strategy. Current social frictions between low-income earners and smaller enterprises are believed a prime example of the divide and conquer. Political wrangling to justify the income disparities between rich and poor or disgraceful attitude to pass the buck to the weak should be avoided.

 

The same is true of the gaming industry. A couple of high-class publishers are dominating the market making trillions of won's worth of sales and hundreds of billion's worth of net profit. Increased big publishers' dominance against small and medium-sized developers for their interests will shake the foundation of the industry in the long run. It's shameful for the strong blame the weak. I expect that not only Korea's economy but also the national gaming industry would grow with a symbiotic relationship between members.

 

 

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

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

 

Translation by Kim Ki-hui