The State of Korean PC Gaming

Gamasutra has up a feature on the world of PC gaming in South Korea, a country well-known for their love of online play. Nick Rumas, the author of the piece, takes us further behind the scenes of a country stereotyped by swarms of screaming StarCraft fans. He looks at what is hot on store shelves, discusses the reality of illegal game downloading there, and walks through the ten most popular online games in the country (StarCraft isn't even #1). From the article: "That, in a nutshell, is where the PC gaming industry in Korea currently finds itself. Physical retail is dead, and while that isn't going to change any time soon, it's a rather insignificant issue, because the online market is the only one that really matters here ... The world of PC gaming in Korea may massively dwarf that of consoles, but Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are engaged in their own little war on the peninsula, as well."

Comments

ROK is cool

[Anonymous Coward]

I lived in South Korea, at Yongsan, from 99-2000. I can tell you, I enjoyed the PC rooms immensely. I was in the army and I had a group of friends who were geeks, of course, and we all fell in love with the PC rooms right away. As the contributor's article said, you just pay a couple of bucks and sit down to these decent sized CRTs(probably LCD now)and go to fragging. The Korean gamers were quite accepting and we used to have some heated american vs korean fights as sometimes we'd go into a place 4-5 strong and most of the shops only seated about 10-12. I really thought this sort of thing could take off in more metropolitan areas in the US, but I haven't seen much evidence. Another cool thing, although most of you will probably roll your eyes, were the naure'bons(sp?), or singing rooms. Basically, they had little places you could go, with 4-5 small rooms that could seat 6-8 people, and this TV and karaoke machine was setup and you had a table in the middle with a book of songs. Cheesy, but immensely fun and in most of the places you could buy beer so that was a plus. Of course now the consoles have the karaoke games, but this could be popular---a lot better than karaoke bars in my opinion.

Anyway, if anyone ever gets a chance to go to South Korea, do it. I wish I could go back, it is a fun culture and a lot of it is westernized, good or bad, but they're used to Americans by now.

Re:Starcraft could be #1

[vigmeister]

I spent New Year's at Seoul on a 20 hr stopover (flew the 'wrong' way to India to get the chance...) and struggled without knowing the language. Buying food, socks(I was wearing flip-flops because I didn't consider that my stopover between 2 cities at 20C would be at -5C ... hehe) and getting a decent place to put my bags was a challenge, but it was a GREAT experience.

The hotel room had a TV and they had quite a few 'Gaming Channels' where they showed other people playing games all day. Most of the shows were Warcraft type strategy games, but some of them were FPS tournaments and Racing games as well. Game reviews were sprinkled in between... I didn't watch for more than an hour or so and the shows were in Korean, but I did get the feeling that out of the 6-7 channels only 1-2 could've be anything other than 24hr game channels ...

The Dongdaemun electronics market was also fascinating from a nerd POV. Few to no pirated games, really cool phones, mp3 players and the like... It was pretty cool except for the fact that I knew I would've been fleeced given the absence of fixed prices and exorbitant tags on the devices on display... I wasn't planning on buying electronics either

The new years eve celebration itself was fantastic. I managed to get in the centre of the action based on a tip to get there 5 hrs early from a cute girl at the airport (who spoke bad english). The intersection of two roughly 6 lane roads was packed with people in all four directions for about half a mile each way and EACH ONE of them had a firecracker of some sort. Coupled with extravagant dancing and music performances at the square and an hour of organized fireworks (with people's fireworks competing) meant that it was one of the greatest experiences I've had. My hair smelled of phosphorus and sulphur for a couple of days even after about 7-8 shampooing efforts...

If you wanna go to Seoul, make it ther for new years...

</nostalgia>

Cheers!