One of Korea’s most popular PC online game soon to be now available in Xbox360.
Neople and Softmax co-developed a Xbox360 LIVE arcade game version of 2D side-scrolling MORPG <Dungeon & Fighter>. Here’s the promotion trailer.
» Read more: Enjoy Dungeon & Fighter with Xbox360 LIVE Soon
According to Chinese statistics company, FPS online game <Crossfire> made 995 billion won(US$860M) in Chinese market this year. Thereby it actually opened a new era of 1 trillion won revenue in China for the first time in the online game history.
<Crossfire> also has surpassed 3 million concurrent users(CCU) last August. Although the CCU is a bit lesser than what of <Dungeon and Fighters> it is making nearly double revenue. While it made about US$860M <D&F> could only make US$464M.
Top 10 most profitable non-Chinese games from the statistics are <Crossfire>(1st), <D&F>(2nd), <Legend of Mir>(5th), <Dragon Nest>(6th), and <WoW>(7th).
Not related to the article.
Here’s surprise news, well, it is maybe tempting to only Koreans.
S.Korea’s interpol announced that they arrested 5 people on charge of making auto-farming program in pursuit of making money out of well-known online games in S.Korea with N.Korean developers. They had allegedly worked with 30 N.Korean programmers in China since last June 2009. The police is considering this case as not just a simple money making affair but a preparation of cyber terror against S.Korea from N.Korea.
According to the report from the police, the N.Korean developers had worked in groups of <Lineage>, <Maple Story>, and <Dungeon & Fighter> and distributed more than 12,000 copies of the program to S.Korea and China. The police are currently investigating on any possibility of smuggling of viruses or hacking tools via the program.
The police said “According to our investigation, all the programmers from N.Korea graduated IlSung Kim University and are presumed members of a N.Korean trade company which raises fund for JungIl Kim the president of N.Korea. The program is also assumed as a multi-purpose tool for later cyber terror.”
What’s funny here is that the police depicted that they had stolen gamers’ items and money by hacking online game servers. Why it is funny? It tells how dumb the police is in online gaming field.
The auto-farming program is a simple program to run repetitive action patterns over and over in the game, not something to hack the secured servers.
A security official also said “It could be used as a malicious code distriubter, but absolutely not as a packet stealer or whatever related to server hacking. Concepts of auto-farming and hacking are totally different. I think the police mistook looting specific items which is one of the program functions as hacking specific item packets from the server in order to develop the program.”
We are not sure if they are really worked for national purpose yet. But I think they are just hungry and poor developers who just needed enough money to eat. Or not.
Nexon announced that its popular MMORPGs <Maple Story> and <Dungeon & Fighter> broke their CCU records again.
<Maple Story> gathered 588,067 concurrent users last Saturday thanks to its trilogy updates after 2 weeks of having its highest CCU 417,000. It is the biggest number in Korea ever.
Meanwhile, <D&F> also topped its highest record, achieving 290,000 CCU. It also launched a big update called ‘D&F Revolution’ that introduces a lot of new things. Additionally it also recorded 2.6m CCU in China which is its hightest record ever.
Chinese online game history is pretty short compared to that of other industries. 10 years. Not very long, but number of historical games are not so few.
Major global companies Shanda, NetEase, 9You, Tencent, etc. are those who grew with the mega-hit online games in the past.
They can’t deny the fact that they had compeletly counted on the Korean online games instead of self-developed games. Until 2005, more than 90% of Chinese game market was filled with foreign games which is again mostly Korean games.
Cross Fire, the most Chinese gamers play.
Today’s Chinese gaming behemoth Tencent publishes <Cross Fire> and <Dungeon & Fighter> which currently surpass 3m CCU and 2.6m CCU respectively. 3m CCU is the top CCU in China ever and probably the biggest number in a sole market I believe.
Legend of Mir 2. It featured low-spec and various contents.
The first Korean mega-hit online game was <Legend of Mir 2> of WeMade Entertainment.
It blew the market with 800,000 CCU in 2003 and was, needless to say, a key driver for both WeMade and Shanda, the Chinese publisher of <Legend of Mir 2>.
It had grown as big as occupying more than 60% of market share in 2005. It celebrated its 10th anniversary this year and still generates huge revenue of about US$ 2b.
DNF
China encourages fostering domestic company while restricting overseas company strongly. So overseas companies cannot enter the market without a Chinese partner at all.
Despite of it, most of the mega-hit games came from Korea or the U.S.; MMORPG <World of Warcraft>, 2D side-scrolling MORPG <Dungeon and Fighter>, and FPS <Cross Fire>.
It’s somewhat upset for China of the fact that its developers have not followed or have not led its own market so far in spite of having the biggest sole market in the world.
