Tracing the dynamic walks of Korea Game Watch
Friday, November 26th, 2010Several events have taken place since we uploaded our last post about Korea Game Watch, our new business branch for Korean online games. The first of all is G-Star 2010, the largest game exhibition and trade show in Korea. We were there to meet some small, mid-sized game studios and foreign publishers interested in Korean games. Overall, G-Star 2010 was a big success, drawing over 280,000 visitors from all over the world – that is 40,000 people more than last year’s G-Star, a 9% increase. In addition, according to KOCCA (Korea Creative Contents Agency), a total of 166 deals were secured in this year’s show, and the total amount adds up to USD 198 million, exceeding last year’s record of USD 28 million by a large margin. Here are some photos of G-Star 2010 taken at the B2B fair.
A long line of booths in the B2B area; In this year’s G-Star, 316 game-related businesses participated from 22 different counties.
KOCCA also opened up a booth of its own in order to promote and provide support for games from small and mid-sized studios in Korea. For your information, the booth is named “Global Game Herb Center, a Joint Information Center”
More pictures and information regarding our trip to G-Star 2010 can be found here on our Korea Game Watch site:
1) G-Star 2010 ends in record-breaking success
2) G-Star’s Big Fours – Blade & Soul, TERA, ArcheAge, and Diablo 3
Another big event was Korea Game Watch’s very first seminar, “Strategies for Korean Online Games Entering Europe” held on November 23rd at Seoul Partners House. The seminar was hosted in joint with ICO Partners (CEO: Thomas Bidaux), our UK-based partner consultancy that specializes in arranging European partnerships for online gaming business. The seminar invited Korea-based game studios and related business agencies to offer insights and guidelines on entering the European online game market, an untapped market for many online game developers in Korea.
The three-hour long seminar consisted mainly of analyses of the European market and the market’s characteristics. There were also case studies of Korean online games that became successful role models in Europe and those that failed to appeal to the European audience. Overall, the seminar ended with fruitful results and spurred up KGW’s motivation for more research and activity. Korea Game Watch also managed to receive much press attention as many game webzine reporters and newspaper journalists attended the seminar as well. Here is a link to our post on Korea Game Watch that recapitulates the seminar: Reflecting on Korea Game Watch’s very first seminar. More information on ICO Partners is also available on SlideShare: ICO Partners: Building Your Business in Europe.