Gravity chairman Jeong-ryul Kim displays a map that marks his growing empire. The gaming boom also shows how quickly a relatively new technology can inspire widespread cultural changes. In just a few years, online games have become serious competition to movies for mass entertainment in South Korea, despite the stereotypical images of game parlours as ill-lit rooms filled with cigarette smoke and budding criminals.
"PC baangs," as the parlours are known, are usually clean and wholesome places where teenagers often go for dates. Last year, Webzen invited gamers and their families to an event to help dissipate some of the negative reputations of online gaming in downtown Seoul. Around 30,000 people showed up.
Canadian gamer Guillaume Patry learned of the Korean passion for online gaming firsthand when he travelled to Seoul for a "StarCraft" tournament in 1999. He was stunned to find 1,000 fans at his first match.
"People knew me. In Canada, I was just a teenager," he said. Crowds escalated after he won the "StarCraft" world championship. Although he has slipped in the rankings since, fans still stop his "managers" -- foreigners hanging out with him in public -- for a photo or an autograph.
A monthly subscription to a game costs around $25 a month in Korea, but because many players go to PC baangs, several people can get access to a game through a single subscription. In China, subscriptions cost around $7.
Different companies take different approaches in international expansion. Gravity licenses "Ragnarok" to independent operators which then pay the company royalties. Webzen licenses its game to publishers but also sets up server farms in international markets to sell subscriptions directly, a technique also used by NCsoft.
Webzen plans to bring "Mu" -- in which players battle the malicious Kundun and his various agents -- to the United States in three months and open an American office.
Talkback
SK's government support of broadband penetration has a lot to do with this.