Capcom’s Ken in Korean “Perfect KO”

And here is the character selection screen with Ken from Street Fighter on display: By Navid Firouz

Korean MMO Street Fighter

Today I bought the newly released Street Fighter 4. The last version I played was Street Fighter 2 on SNES – which is still Capcom’s best selling version I believe. When writing this blog I thought about how much fun it would be to have an MMO version of Street Fighter 4. So I found this Korean [...]

Korea’s Free Gaming Model (Part 2/2)

Following the first part of this post I am going into some details about in-game advertising and alternative revenue streams that enable “free to play” games. In-game advertising is nothing new. The US company Massive, which was purchased by Microsoft in 2006, provides services to host advertising within videogames. However the placement of adverts is [...]

Korea’s Free Gaming Model (Part 1/2)

Where the US has become the Mecca of basketball through its NBA super athletes, Korea’s super internet technology is making it the capital of online games. Let’s look back down memory lane first. I remember playing Midway’s “NBA Jam” basketball game in 1993 – published by Acclaim. It was my favourite arcade sports game for [...]

Korean Games Industry and its Stable Economic Roots

Today the Q4 results of 2008 are out and a majority of Korean online game portals have announces higher than ever sales figures (NHN and Hangame, Neowiz, CJ, etc…). For the last ten years Korean online portals seem to have successfully cultivated their domestic games market and target audience. Established micro-transaction models appear to be [...]

Aion™ – A new MMORPG from Korea using CryTek™

A former colleague of mine works at NCSoft, the Korean games publisher. One of their biggest recent projects is  Aion™. It is quite interesting that the game’s graphics engine is CryTek™. Now I understand why the German company behind CryTek has setup a new office in South Korea just three months ago. The following website [...]

Weight of Korea’s Online Games Market

Recently the consulting firm PearlSearch has published an interesting study about the Korean games market in 2009. In their summary it states that 80% of households are already connected to the internet. Out of those the age group of 20-30 account for 67%, paying for online content. Korea’s big game portals seem to attract up to [...]