Futurize Korea

Nintendo Korea announced that they had sold 500,000 Wii game systems in Korea:

The popularity of the two gaming consoles here is regarded by many local tech experts as an unusual event, since online computer games are generally more popular than console gaming in Korea. Sales of Nintendo-related software products, however, fell short of the success seen in its hardware sales.

Wii Sports, the most popular title among Wii users in Korea, has sold 210,000 units, while New Super Mario Brothers, the most widely sold gaming title for DS Lite, barely reached 440,000 units.

Korean online gaming firms are proving to be resilient during the recession:

``When money is tight, people look for cheaper sources of entertainment, and online games fit the bill perfectly,'' said Sung Hyun-sook, a researcher with the Korea Game Industry Agency (KOGIA), who says that the sector is now officially out of its mini two-year slump.

``The game industry has been maintaining growth since the later part of last year, and we expect the momentum to continue, as recent products have been setting a new bar in quality. The massive buzz generated by NCsoft's Aion certainly made a difference.''

Blizzard’s Dustin Browder, the lead designer of StarCraft II,  was interviewed by the Wired’s GameLife blog and mentioned how they approached South Korea’s love of StarCraft with the sequel:

Well, the things that they responded to, we think are valuable. They responded to the things in the game where things were very fast, they responded to the balance, they responded to the uniqueness of the races — these are things they responded to that we felt “y’know, they responded to those because they’re good things, so we need to hold onto those things.”

What they embrace in the future, what Germany or Japan or Taiwan or China embrace in the future, who knows. No idea. Ultimately, at the level I’m at, I don’t even care. What we wanna do is just make the best game that we can make, so we definitely took Korea into account in terms of what they responded to and making sure that we were hitting that or better in those areas. It wasn’t like we’re sorta targeting a specific fad or trying to organize a “how can we make them love it?”