Despite growing up on PC games, Korea’s indie scene is all about Android

Korea was once synonymous with online gaming, typified by the PC-bangs packed with people, choosing from a relatively unchanging array of popular games. The popularity of the country’s favorite PC games can endure for years, and even now eSports titles are true spectacles with no signs of slowing. The real competition, however, has shifted to mobile in Korea. Nowhere is this more evident than in the country’s growing indie community, which is almost exclusively focused on mobile development.

This may not come as a surprise given the country’s utter saturation with smartphones, estimated at 70 percent market penetration earlier this year with 86 percent of those running Android. All of this, of course, in a country with more phones than people. Large companies are expected to follow trends, but the fact that indie developers are so focused on mobile development is interesting. Compared to the West, or even Japan, Korean indies have been quick to adopt mobile, or, perhaps, slow to branch out to other gaming platforms.

”Indie”

The term “indie” is not always the most easy to define. While generally it is supposed to mean any studio not signed exclusively to a publisher, it covers a range of developers from solo operations to thriving small businesses. The majority of these upstart indie teams could probably share a table at Starbucks, but if you put them all together, they would fill convention centers.

Korea Games Conference 2014 (KGC) kicked off yesterday in Seoul, and will be running through tomorrow. It’s a smaller, more developer-friendly pre-game compared to the massive crowds of Busan’s G-Star later this month. While there are several tracks, the mobile one may be its most robust and comprehensive, and certainly has smaller developers in mind.

Ranging from technical presentations by Unity and Havok about mobile development to lessons from Line, NHN Entertainment, and mobile developers from China, it’s hard to imagine who these talks could benefit more than the country’s independent mobile devs. The event’s “indie summit” is also highlighted by mobile developers. Buff Studio, the maker of Buff Knight, is among the speakers. A fitting inclusion, because the one-man studio focusing on Android game development typifies Korea’s fast growing scene.

Buff Knight was developed by a solo Korean developer for Android.

For more such examples, one need only visit the Indie-ra! community page. It’s already grown to over 3,000 members, its wall filled each day with new game projects. They’re nearly all on Google Play. Despite being a gathering for all indies, those working on non-mobile titles are the odd ones.

Sun Park, one half of Korean indie studio Turtle Cream Games, is one exception to the rule. His studio’s 6180 was imagined as a PC title, so they targeted a Steam release. When I asked him if more Korean indies are following suit, as many tools make it possible for even small teams to publish to multiple platforms, he too observed the same mobile focus. “Korean indies are almost all in the mobile game scene,” though he hinted that the love for mobile may in some ways be conditional. For small outfits, language is likely a contributing factor:

Only a handful of indies like us are making PC games. There isn’t any local PC game marketplace in Korea. Most players are using Steam or other market sites in English. So if you want to sell your PC game, you should know English. It’s quite a big barrier to Korean devs.

We recently looked at the app stores in Korea, and based on App Annie’s index could see that major mobile players were working hard to consolidate in Korea, primarily through partnerships and mergers. This seemed like an attempt to compete with other regional players, but may just as well have been a response to the horde of indies looking to crack the top of the charts.

See: Unity gains more fuel in Asia, inks deal with NHN Entertainment

Elsewhere, companies like Tencent and Line have often pursued vertical strategies with games, usually investing in studios. While on the surface, Korea’s Kakao functions similarly, it really only provides a platform for games to be discovered. This means, at least domestically, mobile developers have potential access to a huge platform, while maintaining significant creative and business independence.

With Korea already leading the way in per capita app spending, the Land of Morning Calm certain provides fertile ground for mobile devs to sprout up throughout the country.

With the relative ease of development, a lucrative local market, and far lower barrier to entry, it seems obvious now that Korea’s indies would embrace mobile games, but only the most prescient could have supposed this adoption would have been wholesale and most pronounced in the indie community.

This post Despite growing up on PC games, Korea’s indie scene is all about Android appeared first on Tech in Asia.

Despite growing up on PC games, Korea’s indie scene is all about Android