Korea can’t win against Nintendo
South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak recently caused a row in his country when he wondered out loud why Korea couldn’t make a Nintendo DS-like console of their own. “A lot of our elementary school children have Nintendo game machines,” the president told senior policymakers, “Why can’t our companies develop products like that?”
It’s actually a fair question, but one that seem to bristle the fur of just about everyone in the South Korean electronics and software industries. Korean electronics giants Samsung and LG haven’t thought about becoming the next Nintendo recently. Both companies were forced into an early exit from the console market after failing to compete with their Japanese rivals in foreign markets, and the lack of game software in domestic market.
Samsung now settles for producing memory chips for Sony’s PSP and delivering optical disc drives for Microsoft’s Xbox. Reigncom, a mid-sized electronics maker that gathered a significant following for portable music players, also withdrew from its plans to advance to the console market.
GamePark Holdings, a midsized local handheld manufacturer, believes that the problem lies with the lack of software. “The lack of content is evident, as we don’t have many companies here with the personnel and financial capability to develop games, and the open-source model is our best bet for the short term,” said Park Sang-Hoon, the marketing director of GamePark. GamePark Holdings are determined to go forward with an open source model that encourages user developed content and limited development by its own in-house development staff. But Park Sang-Hoon readily admits that won’t be enough to compete with the likes of Nintendo.
“Talking about Nintendo is out of touch, when you consider that the local software market is virtually on life-support,” said an official from a mobile games developer, who didn’t want to be named. “Piracy and lack of quality personnel has killed the vibrancy of the Korean software market, and I wonder whether the government has ever been serious about fostering the country’s software industry. It’s telling that most of the computers at government agencies rely on pirated software,” he said.
I read this report with some disbelief. It’s surprising that a country with a number of well known game publishers (e.g., NCSoft, HanbitSoft) faces such a lack of capability in domestic software production. Certainly, Korean gaming firms have done decently in other parts of the world, so comments from Korean industry insiders seem out of sync to how well some of these firms are doing in publishing games and leading development houses overseas. Didn’t NCSoft recently announce the introduction of Aion (new MMO) into the North American game market? Didn’t HanbitSoft recently announced its intentions to takeover the Hellgate franchise?
While President Lee raised some hackles, maybe the man has a point.
Related posts:
- Kama Sutra for Nintendo DS? So a French developer recently released a digital version...
- Onechanbara: a new low? Game publisher D3 recently reaffirmed the release of two...
- Collective shrug at $99 PS2 As announced in a number of media outlets today...
- Copy protection gets ridiculous Update and edit: It appears that the copyright protection...
- $473,000 to play Warcraft III Jae-ho Jang is a happy man. The 22-year-old video...
