Portal Relaunch Coming

Nexon America ‘Keeping an Eye On’ Non-PC Online Platforms, CEO Says

February 23, 2010 by Jeff Berman|Top News

Nexon America is “keeping an eye on” platforms including the iPhone and consoles, but “our focus right now is on PC online games,” CEO Daniel Kim told us at the Design Innovate Communicate Entertain (D.I.C.E.) Summit in Las Vegas last week. “The infrastructure isn’t quite there” on the other platforms to support the company’s strategy of free play plus micro-transactions, he said.

The U.S. division of Nexon, a South Korean online-game company, is coming off “a very strong year” thanks to strong usage of its games Maple Story, Combat Arms and Mabinogi, Kim said. “Strong growth across all those games” was in the double digits for revenue and profit, he said. The side-scrolling, massively multiplayer online role-playing game Maple Story is the company’s oldest active title in the market, introduced in North America in 2005. The game attracted 30,000 users at the same time last summer, setting a record, and it has about 6 million registered users in North America and about 92 million total, Kim said. It’s available in 60 countries, he said. The first-person shooter Combat Arms, launched in September 2008 and had “explosive growth” last year, hitting 3 million registered users, he said. The role-playing game Mabinogi also has grown strongly since its release just over a year ago, he said.

Nexon America “doubled” its game portfolio for 2010, Kim said. Its Dungeon Fighter Online has been in beta testing since November in the U.S. An official launch date will come “in the next few months,” he said. That title launched in South Korea in 2006 and China in late 2008. Also in beta in the U.S., since last month, is Maple Story iTCG, for “interactive Trading Card Game.” The multiplayer action puzzle game Pop Tag launched in the U.S. last month. It’s already a flagship game for Nexon in South Korea, having attracted 15-20 percent of the country’s population since its launch there in 2002, Kim said.

"One of the big initiatives” by Nexon America this year will be the launch of a rebranded online game portal in the first half, Kim said. The name is changing from Nexon.net to BlockParty and the company will introduce social networking features, he told us. The company is “looking at applications on mobile platforms,” Kim said, adding that Nexon is “aware of the power of the social networks.” The company doesn’t seek to start a site like Facebook, he said, but will look for ways to link players to current social networks. The new portal will also give players customizable profile pages and a real-time news update that announces player accomplishments through a new Play Feed feature, he said. The feature will be available at the time of the rebranded portal’s launch, he said.

The number of U.S. stores carrying Nexon America’s prepaid game cards is up to about 40,000, Kim said. The retailers, some not conventional game merchants, include Albertsons, Barnes & Noble, BJ’s, Blockbuster, CVS, Duane Reade, f.y.e., GameStop, Hastings Entertainment, Kmart, Rite Aid, 7-11, Toys “R” Us, Walgreens and Winn-Dixie, a company spokesman said Monday. Target was the first retailer to carry the cards, in 2007, and achieved “great results,” but “we didn’t renew our contract with them,” Kim said. It was “a business decision. … We felt there were enough other outlets” carrying the cards and “didn’t come to an agreement on the terms.” Also no longer carrying the cards is Best Buy, he said, not specifying why. Nexon’s “goal is to get in as many retailers as possible,” and the company is “pretty agnostic [as] to the type of retailer they are,” he said.

D.I.C.E. Summit Notebook …

While other companies talked up the advantages of social-network games as the industry tries to rebound from a difficult 2009, Mike Yuen, senior vice president of global content and services at Zeebo, pointed to opportunities in emerging markets including Brazil, China, India and Mexico. That’s “probably where the growth is going to come from” in the next few years, he said. Zeebo announced a plan last year to ship a new console for emerging markets using only secure 3G-wireless game delivery (CED March 25 p9). The Zeebo console “launched nationally across Brazil and Mexico in December,” and the company has “sold tens of thousands of units,” Yuen said. “The two major markets Zeebo is targeting next are China and India, with potential commercial launches in 2011. Initial sales results suggest that independent game companies and small brands “can thrive” with this kind of strategy, he said. Yuen asked developers attending the Summit whether they're willing to make content for local consumers, to make a 10-25 MB game for $50,000 to 500,000 and to sell a game for $5-$10 to overcome piracy and would “be happy with singles” rather than “home runs,” referring to the small successes of games offered by Zeebo in relation to blockbusters like Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Yuen also advised developers to “consider virtualization” -- emulated content -- which can be created much faster and less expensively than porting a title natively to the Binary Runtime for Wireless platform, which he called the underlying technology from a developer’s standpoint when creating content for Zeebo. The suggestions “run counter to how the traditional videogame industry typically operates, and this is because they pursue developed countries while we pursue the emerging markets,” Yuen said. “In order to succeed you really need to think differently and outside of the box. … You can’t take and do what you know in developed countries and just assume it'll work in say India, China, Brazil, Mexico.” Meanwhile, in the traditional game business, many studios have closed, and about 11,488 jobs were lost from late 2008 through 2009 among 95 companies, he said, citing M2 Research data. About 71 percent of the jobs were in the U.S., 13 percent in Europe, 12 percent in Asia and 2 percent each in Australia and Canada, he said.

Next year’s D.I.C.E. Summit will be Feb. 9-11, again at the Red Rock hotel in Las Vegas, Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences President Joseph Olin told us … The big winner at the Interactive Achievement Awards, held during the Summit last week, was Sony Computer Entertainment’s PS3 game Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, the winner of 10 awards including Game of the Year. Other winners included Sony’s Flower as the Casual Game of the Year and MTV Games’ The Beatles: Rock Band as the Family Game of the Year.