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Current Status of Game Industry and Development Environment : Junhee Yoon

With the booming growth of the cultural contents industry, the size of the Korean game industry accounts for about half the total contents industry exports. As such, small-cap games, often referred to as serious and indie games, are emerging in the game market, with the increase of industrial value. There are new ways to introduce various indie games such as the Google Indie Game Festival and the Busan Indie Connect Festival (BIC Festival). Due to the rapid growth of not only new game genres but also new fields surrounding games, games are creating another industrial value converged with next-generation technologies.

With the booming growth of the cultural contents industry, the size of the Korean game industry accounts for about 55% of the total contents industry exports. We examined the current status and issues of the Korean game industry, which is worth 11 trillion Korean won with 80,000 workers, and introduced strategies that made it possible for small indie games developed in Korea to advance globally and succeed.

Creating a game requires people from various fields. In this lecture, various jobs related to game production, including graphics, planning, programs, sound design, game servicing, operating will be introduced.From an industrial perspective, games of today are becoming more important. Korean games are becoming popular to the point that the size of the Korean game industry accounts for about half the total contents industry exports. Although the history of the content industry itself is short, new genres of games are being developed every day, and games now have important industrial value.If we look closely at these trends in the Korean game market, the polarization of the Korean game market has worsened due to market reorganization centered on big companies. The domestic game market has already advanced, and major game companies continue to focus on capital-driven marketing strategies, which intensifies competition.However, indie game developers, along with big company game developers, are bringing new energy to the game industry. They play a role in increasing the diversity of the game industry with innovative ideas, and are gradually becoming potentially commodifiable. Therefore, Korean indie games were able to enter international markets and achieve great success.

Various Commercially Successful Indie Games in Korea

Small-cap games, often referred to as serious and indie games, are challenging to be new genre games. Indie developers were able to successfully challenge the international game market by producing creative games rather than one-size-fits-all games based on commercial logic. Recently, in order to target the emerging international market of the mobile game industry, developers began to build their interest in One Build, a low-spec genre game that provides a single version for both Google Play and Apple’s App Store.

The American indie game, Minecraft, officially released in 2011, surpassed 100 million downloads in 2016, and Microsoft acquired it for 2.5 trillion Korean won.

Not only with the rapid growth of new game genres such as serious games, but with various new fields from game platforms, XR (Extended Reality), E-Sports, blockchain and cryptocurrency surrounding games, games today have become a universal leisure culture in the digital age. And with the convergence of new generation tech, games began to have other commercial values.

an Online Game Based on the World’s First Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrency Ethereum, Published in December 2017, CryptoKitties

The convergence of technology and services has established a new game development environment that will lead the new generation content industry. Also, in Korea, new opportunities for launching various indie games such as Google Indie Game Festival, Busan Indie Connect Festival (BIC Festival), and Seoul Indies are growing. Therefore, in this lecture, we looked at the current status of the domestic game market and heard various stories for building a better game ecosystem through strategies and examples which made small indie games in Korea successful.

Junhee Yoon (Advisor for Korea Game Developers Association)Junhee Yoon is a former president and current advisor of the Korea Game Developers Association, and is currently serving as the industry-academic vice president of the Korea Computer Game Association, a member of the Self-Regulation Evaluation Committee of the Game User Protection Center, and a member of the Game Culture Promotion Forum of the Korea Creative Content Agency.

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