It's been a mercurial year in the gaming industry with layoffs and closures and mergers. In today's Free Zone, we take a look at three Korean companies as illustrative of the issue. Check it out before leaving your thoughts in the comments.

While I'm like most others in regarding Nexon as Korean, there's a technicality. It's actually headquartered in Japan. Among other things, this means its financial reports are denominated in yen. A couple of weeks ago, the company released numbers for both the last quarter of 2012 and the entire year. As usual, some of them piqued my interest. 

Read more of Richard Aihoshi's The Free Zone: Two Koreans Grow, One Shrinks.

Richard, the full article doesn't want to load for me. It's the only article I've encountered so far that acts like this.

Edit: It works now.

I think the fact that our Market is only 3.6% if a very important number. It can really make you stop and think about why MMOs are headed in the direction they are.

I don't think its any big secret that most of us here on MMORPG feel MMOs are declining, but it may just be because the wants of our small market are different from the wants of Japan and Korea.

The Asian (and soon Russian) markets are so big that they dominate the global economy (for gaming). With the increased internationalization of gaming due to the internet... it is not unexpected to see the Western Markets become the secondary markets... even to the companys that operate here (Activision/Blizzard, EA, etc). It is becoming more evident that developers have to hit the major markets (Asia/Russia) else they will be pushed out of the global market, or just bought out by one of the companies that do hit the bigger markets.

There will be a lot more consolidation in the next few years.. with the Asian publishers just buying up the smaller developers, to re-tool them for the Asian markets. The good news is that this should generate a lot more indies, who can survive in the (smaller) western markets, until they are bought out also.

Great article Richard.  There is a lot to chew on there.  What sticks out most to me is the 3.6% figure.  Why has our NA contribution become so anemic?  Is that because of a blooming Asian market or a lack of interest from the NA playerbase?

I'm also curious how Perfect World fits into all of this.  I understand there are a lot of publishers to consider but PWE seems like one of the biggies.  In one of your upcoming articles could you highlight how Nexon, PWE, and other major players fit together, are competing, etc.

Originally posted by Torvaldr

Great article Richard.  There is a lot to chew on there.  What sticks out most to me is the 3.6% figure.  Why has our NA contribution become so anemic?  Is that because of a blooming Asian market or a lack of interest from the NA playerbase?

I'm also curious how Perfect World fits into all of this.  I understand there are a lot of publishers to consider but PWE seems like one of the biggies.  In one of your upcoming articles could you highlight how Nexon, PWE, and other major players fit together, are competing, etc.

Ditto on interest in an overview of the majors.  Also on the market share of individual properties.

Mind you the share is only secondary after the total amount of revenues per market.

It's not like 5.5%+3.6% or 23.9% is some pennies when you earn 20% more than WoW in total or half of it.  Even including WoWs expansion box sales. We are talking about hundredmillion Dollars in a y year here in the West by either one of these companies.

Thats much more than any "Western" MMO or MMORPG aside from WoW earns it self (excludes GW2 as its NCSoft's own game). Of course it combines multiple games of theirs. But dont be fooled to believe their marketshare here is tiny, just because they are more successfull in the East. SwtoR may be the only one still sliding close to it but only due to its "recent" release and only recently turning F2P due to the poor retention. The next stable one would be EvE with barely more than half of either ones Western revenues.

Too many have the false and unreal impression (in some cases leaning to ignorant delusions), that the Western market is something "10 million WoW user * 12 months * 15 bucks + 5 Million WOW boxsales * 60 bucks" large and the East maybe only "like 10 million * 1$ * 12 month" small and the only game they have some clue about has some +50% global MMORPG marketshare, when its not even close to a quarter, because thats simply all they hear and know about.

3.6% is only scary if we know what it is relative too.  Maybe WoW is also in that same range when comparing %.  Obviously the market is bigger in the east, but I'd love to know total numbers of players for that 3.6% and compare that to total player of other popular western MMOs just to get a reference.  That would be interesting.

Originally posted by Torvaldr

Great article Richard.  There is a lot to chew on there.  What sticks out most to me is the 3.6% figure.  Why has our NA contribution become so anemic?  Is that because of a blooming Asian market or a lack of interest from the NA playerbase?

I'm also curious how Perfect World fits into all of this.  I understand there are a lot of publishers to consider but PWE seems like one of the biggies.  In one of your upcoming articles could you highlight how Nexon, PWE, and other major players fit together, are competing, etc.

You also have to consider that most people on here consider MMO's as mainly MMORPG's and with the article expressing that Nexons bulk of revenue comes from Dungeon Fighter http://dungeonfighter.nexon.net/ its a completely different market. In Asia you play in internet cafe's which makes playing together more natural so they have taken to all sorts on online games more easily than us westerners, games like Dungeon Fighter are mainly laughed at on this boards and ignored by most others. Nexon also has about the same income as EA and Activision so our market is not just about online gaming. It would be interesting to see what the figures are in Asia for non-online games.

Originally posted by Superman0X

The Asian (and soon Russian) markets are so big that they dominate the global economy (for gaming). With the increased internationalization of gaming due to the internet... it is not unexpected to see the Western Markets become the secondary markets... even to the companys that operate here (Activision/Blizzard, EA, etc). It is becoming more evident that developers have to hit the major markets (Asia/Russia) else they will be pushed out of the global market, or just bought out by one of the companies that do hit the bigger markets.

 

There will be a lot more consolidation in the next few years.. with the Asian publishers just buying up the smaller developers, to re-tool them for the Asian markets. The good news is that this should generate a lot more indies, who can survive in the (smaller) western markets, until they are bought out also.

The Russian market is smaller than the US market, not sure what you are attempting to say there.  China is the bull in the china shop here, the Koreans will probably all be looking at China as a leader soon.

Besides GW2, NCSoft has not had a lot of winners lately.  I don't see anything coming down the pipeline this year either.  Could be that NCSoft is on the decline?  Only time will tell.

I think that 3.6% you are all referring to is the percentage of that companies market share in the west.  You should not confuse that with western MMO market share.  Eastern MMO's do not seem to be that popular in the west.

Originally posted by Razeekster
I'm honestly scared of Nexon overtaking everything. They are terrible at communicating to their players and never answer tickets. NCsoft always gets back to you within 24 hours (in my personal experience), while Nexon literally takes months, sometimes even years!

+1 they've still not answered my support ticket to date (my dragon nest account was hacked last year due to THEIR insecurities)