Recommended Top MMORPG: Korea is Home to the Leading MMORPG Game Companies!

Recommended Top MMORPG: Korea is Home to the Leading MMORPG Game Companies!

What is MMORPG?

[천(CHEON)] MMORPG is short for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, and it indicates a role playing game that one or more players can enjoy in virtual space through network such as internet. It started from TRPG (Table talk Role-Playing Game, Traditional Role-Playing Game). MMORPG was created by combining network with infra after going through phases of RPG (Role Playing Game) game genres that can be enjoyed both on a PC or console.

Since people don’t need to be at the same place because of network, and since world view and rules are provided through software, people can easily experience MMORPG role playing. With MMORPG, people can reach the topmost place through collaboration and competition in a world setting. People can establish new social relationships by growing another ‘me’ in the virtual world. And more diverse forms of services are provided as time passes. MMORPG is the most popular form of online game even now, inviting worldwide gamers to the virtual world.

Among the fifty most popular games, seventeen are MMORPG, showing its never-ending popularity

Korean game companies that represent MMORPG

The most representative Korean MMORPG game companies companies are NCSOFT, NEXON, NHN. These companies have entered foreign countries such as Europe, Japan, China, and South East-Asia and raising the status of Korean brand as Korean culture contents honorary ambassador.

1. NCSOFT

Among the companies that develop and service games in Korea, the most prominent is the one and only NCSOFT. Ever since it serviced the online game, Lineage, in 1998, NCSOFT successively introduced Lineage 2 in 2003, Guild Wars the best hit game in North American markets in 2005, and Aion in 2008, sustaining the top place in Korean MMORPG.

In 2011, NCSOFT is expected to sustain its place by introducing Guild Wars 2 and Blade & Soul. Starting from establishing a local subsidiary in America in 2000, it entered Japan in 2001, China and Taiwan in 2003, Europe and Thailand in 2004, and Russia in 2009, casing the brand power of NCSOFT in the world. Also, NCSOFT established studio in abroad (ArenaNet) to respond strategically to the global market, growing as a global brand.

2. NEXON

NEXON is the company that is protecting its No.1 place by making MMORPG great hits like The World of Wind (the world’s first online game), Maple Story, Dungeon and Fighter, Mabinogi, and Mabinogi Hero. It was the first Korean company to have an interest in discovering foreign markets and exported The World of Wind to America in 1997. Ever since, it services about twenty games in sixty countries and has 302 million members in the world. Especially having local subsidiaries in America, Japan, and Europe, and also establishing a base in the widest Asian markets including China, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia, and the South American region such as Brazil, NEXON is striving to grow as a global entertainment company.

3. NHN

NHN makes-up one entire axis of the Korean game world as the biggest company with thirty thousand Korean members, the highest number of concurrent users of 29,000 and providing 361 games. It’s representative MMORPG games are TERA, C9, SUN, and it has local subsidiaries in Japan and America, responding fast through localized strategy that was fitted to the play pattern of relevant country’s users. The characteristic of NHN is that not only does it develop its own games, but NHN connects with developers that have competitiveness through partnership, combining various marketing factors with games that were developed in each developers’ studio and publishing them.

The reason Korean MMORPG was able to succeed overseas

Starting with the world’s first online game The World of Wind, Korean MMORPG genre games grew fastest and most rapidly in the world. First, Korea has PC rooms and fast internet speed, which cannot be found in other country. Professionalization of game and passion, which cannot be found in other country, such as the creation of major of Game in universities, appearance of professional game development school, and the establishment of new job classification ‘Pro gamer’ made Korea as the best creator of MMORPG.

Pictured above is the team for The Country of Wind MMORPG game that made it into the 2011 Guinness Book of World Records for the best longest running commercial graphics MMORPG

Also, Korea developed engines that can stably service games on a PC and network base and optimized them. Providing graphics and sound that are brilliant and realistic to the extent that it’s hard to distinguish them between reality and virtual reality, Hack & Slash games have are thrilling while collaboration, opposition, and interaction between players called growth and competition made Korea MMORPG different from other country’s MMORPG.

Moreover, such MMORPG was fitted to be a profitable business, with phased service strategy, various platforms that is based on the game (WEB, Billing, Security, CRM, GMS)—leading countries to seek non other than Korean MMORPG.

One of the reasons that Korean MMORPG is popular is customized services that reflect the country’s cultural code, optimized infra, localized strategy and a system that caters to each country’s cultural and environmental factors. Korea’s fast internet environment, computer graphic technology, and customized service for each country are the driving forces that made Korea into the best MMORPG exporter in the world.

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