"Games, the Contents and the Economy" written by Acean D Park]

泥中蟠龍 's Game 愛歌 [A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]   A break for South Korea's gaming industry   Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) will be held soon. I have kept writing for a newspaper for four years since around the 18th film festival in 2013. But it seems like just yesterday. I'm not trying to show off although I'm somewhat overwhelmed by the long-period time and there were many pleasant memories. Frankly speaking, the opening sentence of the column is nothing short of a struggle to escape from finding a new subject because I simply can't decide what to write about today. This quite often happened for the past four years as the deadline drew near. I used to sit in front of a computer looking at the monitor for a good while with no definite idea.   In this case, I usually try to have my attention drawn away running through a book or playing a video game. I used to find myself begging a subject from ...

泥中蟠龍 's Game 愛歌 [A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]   Mechanized man and humanized AI   Recently, I started to give a lecture on game design to students majoring in video games at a university. I was so excited for the new classes that my heart was pounding. Of course, it was not a new experience for me and I also have given special lectures several times. However, this opportunity seemed very significant for me because I was an ineffectual teacher ten years ago and when it comes to the occasional lectures since then, they were mostly about not game design but investment-related topics. So I started the new semester promising myself to make my lectures helpful and valuable for all educatees.   Frankly speaking, the first few times of lessons were unpleasant, contrary to my expectations. I guess that student's low levels of understanding content ranked at the top of the main causes.   A tutee who wants ...

泥中蟠龍 's Game 愛歌 [A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]   Artificial intelligence, AlphaGo, and Space Invaders   Technology seems less relevant to a video game. A language created and used by artificial intelligence (AI) was reported on the news recently. To sums up, machine intelligence, which was in the process of learning how to negotiate with the other AI, made the new language for itself to bring about better results. The method of AI communication was so quite unlike any other existing human languages that nobody could understand their conversation.   The brand-new language can imply many meanings. In the first place, human languages might not be effective. Negotiators usually exchange a lot of opinions to find a way to cope with a problem. AI may have made the entirely-new one which can replace inefficient human words. Secondly, technology on artificial intelligence has already developed enough to create a new la...

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 5)   Steam is now a video game distribution service based on electronic software distribution (ESD). The platform will keep making up for the weaknesses and building on the strengths. It will also expand its service into many diverse fields using its dominant subscriber pool. Steam users are expected to choose controller hardware including Steam Controller, which lets users play its entire collection of Steam games, and select a currency or a language as they wish as it expands its service to many countries. It is attempting to support VR content and to expand the business into non-PC games. The Steam platform is supposed to sustain steady growth based on its extensive experiences and a flood of users. So, let's find out what domestic developers should prepare to go into foreign markets through Valve's channel which has the potential...

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 4)   In January 2017, Steam graded on 100 top games released in 2016 regardless of their sales rank. The highest selling 12 games were classified as 'Platinum games'. It included The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Rocket League, Fallout 4, Sid Meier's Civilization VI, XCOM 2, No Man's Sky, Total War: Warhammer, Tom Clancy's The Division, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Grand Theft Auto V, Dark Souls III, and Dota 2. In particular, the achievement of Rocket League — the only Platinum-tiered indie game — was exceptional. The other independent games such as Stardew Valley, Subnautica, and Astroneer were landed on the top 100 best games. The four smaller-developer-made games on the chart show that the PC gaming platform seems to be in favor of indie games so far.   Compared 2015 top-sales ranking list by Steam Spy to the 20...

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 3)   There are many strong points of Steam. First of all, it supports various operating systems. The digital distribution platform, which was originally based on Windows, now provides the best possible environment for not only Mac OS X and Linux, etc. but also console games on PlayStation and Xbox, etc. and it is finding a way to assist mobile games at present. Moreover, users can select a language among more than 20 ones including English, Japanese, and Korean and they can pay by credit cards, the payment system in smartphones, or various gift cards. The payment system includes many different currencies of the world such as dollars, euro, pounds, yen, and won, etc. so that Steam provides a convenient form of payment method for its consumers in numerous countries and various environments.   The other advantage of the platf...

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 2)   As I noted the success of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds in the Part1, Steam can be a meaningful distribution platform for domestic game developers. If you know your enemies and yourself, you will not be put at risk even in a hundred battles. So let's find out more about Steam first.   Steam is a video game distribution platform by Valve Corporation, an American video game developer and publisher, for more than 10 years from 2002 to the present. The large online distributor that is similar to a global open market has more than 200 million users worldwide and, so far, a lot of video games have been released on it.   Valve Software was originally famous for the leading game developer which made first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Half-Life and Counter-Strike, etc. In particular, Half-Life, Valve's firs...