泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌 [A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity] Start-ups and pro baseball

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌

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

 

Start-ups and pro baseball

 

Recently I read an article about Kim Jin-Wook, a new manager of KT Wi—a South Korean professional baseball team. In the story, although it may sound strange, he was said to order his staff not to give him any information about players. It was quite new for me who have been familiar with the teachings of elders or superiors. But I could not help nodding my head in the agreement since I heard the rest of the story. He means that pushing players to take them to the next level will not lead to a high level of baseball proficiency. The new head coach thought that a very important skill is making good relationships with each player to help them to learn how to play for themselves.

 

This case cannot be simply work in most other companies. Running a business is based on manuals for stable production and management and the firm has to produce a product of the same quality in spite of changes in group membership. And creating effective business systems is very important. On the other hand, the professional baseball team and start-ups have much in common.

 

Performances of both greatly depend on individual ability. If the highest level players—Ryu Hyun-jin, Lee Seung-Yeop, and Lee Dae-ho—are replaced with moderately skilled players or inexperienced rookies, the team cannot be expecting to do well as much as the original members. Likewise, if a developer, senior executive, or team leader in the start-up with a small number of employees is replaced with someone, the company is not what it used to be.

 

Since I have worked in the venture capital firm for five years, I've seen many cases that CEOs fired employees, who were definitely not impressed, to replace them with new staff; they tended to identify start-ups with mid-size companies. In general, the chief executive officers made mention of the system. They thought that a reliable and effective business system can guarantee the company's stable growth. Of course, it applies to midsize businesses. However, a startup company, which typically faces high uncertainty, starts to lose its power to grow at the very moment when members of the firm feel that they are part of the business system. I'm sure that nobody wants to be treated as an alternative mechanical part. They probably would get a stable job without the fear of taking risks not joining as employees at a recently created company. Safety and stability are not so bad, however, they do not fit into general startup characteristics.

 

Video game developers are mostly startup companies. Building a stable system for those startups does not hold water. In addition, so does a venture capital firm where I work for or a business organization that partners with a startup to come up with something. If you discourage members of the group for expressing their opinions only emphasizing the business system although you are also a startup related worker, it's not much different from an idea that a high school baseball team which moves according to its coach can perform well as much as a pro baseball team does. Startups and mid-size companies are totally different. In other words, they are not in the same league. I hope that a lot of startup CEOs will not be under the illusion.

 

 

※ 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] What publishers need now is to reflect on themselves

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌

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

 

What publishers need now is to reflect on themselves

 

My wife and I watched a movie Where to Invade Next last weekend. It's the black-comedy-like American documentary film—suggesting some European countries' alternative methods of solving social and economic problems in the United States—directed by Michael Moore who is famous for his other films such as Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko. I was more interested in labor rights among many issues—school education, health care, and human rights, etc—which the film deals with. To sum up, a corporate has to protect the rights of workers if it wants them to promote the company's interests. It also applies to every boss-subordinate relationship by employment agreement in the entire industry. I'd like to talk about how to establish a fair relationship between the two parties.

 

Recently I participated in a workshop for the revision of the legal system in the content industry. There were case presentations on various unfair business deals, especially examples in the gaming industry. Most of them were about dishonest business practices between big publishers and small businesses. Most smaller developers actually can't afford to take legal action against those large-size companies. And large publishers know the fact better than anyone. Domestic game publishers have canceled contracts with developers due to the recent slowdown in the Korean economy and deteriorating profitability in the local gaming industry. Besides, some have neglected to promote newly-released games. Most publishers are now only focusing on marketing for a few cost-effective existing video games disregarding the other untested new games. In this situation, a developer who made a new game cannot help facing a state of financial difficulty.

 

As the employer-employee relationship, it is highly desirable that the developer's achievement leads to the publisher's success. However, at present, many publishers turn a blind eye to smaller game studios in a predicament for its immediate gains. Even worse, the game maker, which I invested in, was absurdly asked to make up for the financial loss recently when the company demanded cancellation of the contract since the publisher didn't spend proper marketing expenses to promote the new game. I heard on the grapevine that the publisher will downsize its publishing business to concentrate on self-development games while it's focusing on existing games that have gotten satisfactory results so far.

 

A video game publisher is a company that publishes and distributes video games. If it looks down on smaller developers because it is the large company with sufficient money, none of the game makers want to work with the untrustworthy distributor. Neither of them will help out with the publisher when it faces difficulties some time even though it currently has a firm grip on the local gaming industry. They may develop a game itself not because of its business strategy, but rather of concerns over a lack of profitable video games. A less experienced marketing team with untested new games may test its ability for a self-developed video game which costs more than millions of won to develop. Now I expect that big publishers try to be in a trustworthy partnership with smaller developers to ensure that won't happen.

 

 

 

※ 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] Think different bit

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌

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

 

Think different bit

 

Recently, the banning of the 'burkini'—the-whole-body-covered swimsuit, except face, for Muslim women—has stirred up controversy in France. France's ban on wearing the bathing suit, which is similar to a full-body athletic swimsuit, is obscure to me in the country representing liberty, equity, and fraternity. The move was criticized by many people throughout the world because it's the suppression of personal liberty. On the other hand, others believed that it reflected public sentiment in France against radical Islamic terrorist groups. But I think that we can look at this from a different perspective. In France, politics is constitutionally separated from religion and all types of religious expressions from public places are unacceptable. The burkini ban may be a matter of sartorial choice, however, it is quite a different story in the country where a big cross or other religion-related installations cannot be displayed in public places by law. Because the general public can be aware of it as a sign of religious expression. But, apart from that terrorism is a deadly sin or crimes of violence, there is a whole different story about whether Muslims are good or bad.

 

I'm not particularly interested in the swimsuit for Muslim women. I'd like to mention vastly different perspectives on the issue. Some value freedom and others warn of possible dangers of Muslims. Someone talks about the social significance of religion or the historical legitimacy of Islamic groups. Diversity helps people to keep things in perspective beyond the superficial single event. Sometimes a narrow-mindedness view makes us forget important things or blinds us to different ideas. Uniformity leads to other problems all the time. A diversity-deficient-organization may expose itself to the danger of ruining the whole structure due to an unsolved problem. If a farmer plants a single item, the crop may be heavily damaged by blight and harmful insects. Therefore, valuing diversity is an essential aspect of the cultural industry. Similar films or video games will eventually threaten to put all of the film studios or game developers out of business when they are shunned by consumers demanding the new.

 

The recent gaming industry is flooded with numbers of video games that are only slightly different in appearance. Users are no fools. Gamers are obviously aware of the similarity between those games even though they haven't turned away from them yet. You are probably getting tired of eating the same food for a month no matter how delicious it is. Cook needs to try to come up with various recipes to enjoy the same ingredients. So do video games. Even many video game planners making complaints about users—most of them feel safer doing something familiar—and management—they prefer well-tested systems—, are often afraid of breaking free from the frame. Korea's gaming industry is experiencing large difficulties. The local gaming industry is losing competitiveness due to diminished both foreign and domestic investment and lower returns in Korea, while China further enhances video-game technologies. I don't mean that developers should ignore or throw away the genre of conventional video games. But the similar games lacking novelty may speed up user migration faster and there will be no place for national game makers to take a step back.

 

 

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

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

 

Translation by Kim Ki-hui