I am not a huge fan of game though, Korea is famous for its advanced game market, especially in online game. Pearl Research, American consulting firm, forecasts the online games market in Korea will exceed $1.7 billion by 2009, driven by new releases and a fervent gaming culture.

Following chart is Top online game in Korea on October 2008.

Most of games are developed and published by Korean game company,except World of Warcraft which is developed and published by Blizzard. Among these online games, FIFA online 2, ranked as number 3, is developed by both EA(www.ea.com) and Neowiz(www.neowiz.com)

EA traditionally have made package games such as Sims, Need for speed, Battlefield, NBA, and FIFA series. To get into the online game business EA invested the Korean online game company Neowiz, currently EA is the second shareholder of Neowiz. Neowiz is Korean game company, operating online game portal Pmang(www.pmang.net),  top 3 game portal in Korea. Together with Neowiz, EA focused on getting the FIFA series into its online version.

FIFA online 1 was launched in 2006 in Korea and the year after the second version of the game, FIFA online 2, was established. FIFA online 2 is currently reaping its success in Korea  with revenue of around 2 million dollars per month.

I think FIFA online has pretty successed to enter not even Korean online game market also global online game market.  EA is trying to make FIFA online successfull at other countries too. FIFA online 2 was launched in Japan to the public on October 2008. Also FIFA online 2  is preparing to get launched in China and other markets. On November 28, FIFA online 2 will start open beta test globally (If you want to see more about FIFA online 2 open beta test, visit here)

Following video is intro for FIFA online 2, please enjoy.

As 2007 has come to an end, it is a good time to be updated on the Korean mobile market. The market is rather stable and the market shares are rather intact between the three big ones in Korean Telecom - SKT, KTF and LGT.

SKT was fined a couple of years ago due to legislative problems for having a market share above 50% and they are therefore restricted to grow any more (which also means they are having serious international ambitions for the moment). However, as the number of users still increase (mobile penetration is around 90% today) they managed to increase the customer base with more than a million. 2007 was a good year for the mobile market in general and the users increased more than before. However, as the amount of users soon will be peaking, the fight among the existing users will be tougher. LGT are the price pressers and they launched a service of free calls among its customers (for a small monthly fee) in 2007 which forced SKT and KTF to include similar price changes. LGT is not the one with the most new customers in absolute numbers, but they still managed to steal a percent from KTF. KTF are emphasizing the HSPA service very much for the moment.

For more information about the Korean mobile market, feel free to contact me or my company Veyond

Prestigious Financial Times included an article today about the Korean search market. Korea is, as you may already know, not “googlearized” as most other search markets in the world. Instead is Naver the leading portal. Actually, the article states that Naver now is the fifth biggest portal in the world. In Korea, 77 % of the internet searches are made there. Second is Daum with around 11 % and then Yahoo with around 4 %. Google? They have a share of below 2 % of the searches…

According to TechCrunch, Google is currently aiming at the Japanese market and the big search engine in China, Baidu, just lost its CFO under mysterious circumstances. Naver remains strong in Korea and are currently testing around 100 new innovations according to the FT article. One of the key benefits of Naver is the service Jisikin (means something like knowledge person) where people interact by asking and answering questions.

What this really shows is how very developed the TMT (Telecom, Media & Technology) sector in Korea is. “Higher penetration of personal computers, innovative technology and amazing mobile speed well explain why we should increase investment here” Susan Decker (president of Yahoo) said earlier last year in Seoul according to the same article. I couldn’t agree more and would not be surprised if Google is a bit worried that Naver have international ambitions (next up is Japan).