2025 Game Industry White Paper

The 2025 Game Industry White Paper, produced by the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA), offers a comprehensive, data-driven assessment of South Korea's game sector in 2024, with forward-looking indicators for 2025. Its core message is that Korea's domestic market continues to grow modestly even as global growth stalls and player engagement contracts. The domestic game market expanded 3.9% to ₩23.85 trillion, led by mobile games at roughly 59% of revenue, while exports reached $8.5 billion (up 1.3%) and the global market grew only 0.7% to about $220 billion. Meanwhile, the share of surveyed respondents who used games fell from 74.4% in 2022 to 50.2% in 2025, a decline the report treats as a central concern for the industry.

The report's coverage is broad, spanning PC, mobile, console, arcade, and PC café (PC bang) segments, along with industry structure, firm finances, workforce composition, labor conditions, legal and regulatory developments, esports, game education, and consumer behavior. Its survey base includes roughly 816 developers and publishers, 1,000 PC cafés, 261 arcade parlors, 275 game-related education institutions, 1,510 workers, and about 4,477 mobile respondents, with the time frame centered on 2024 and early-2025 outlooks. Several sub-group analyses rest on small samples, and the report itself flags these as indicative rather than definitive.

Among the most consequential findings are the sector's structural strains. Most firms are small: the median capital is only ₩104 million, 52% report operating losses, and the gap between large and small firms is wide in both finances and labor conditions. Employment reached 87,576, but working hours rose, job satisfaction declined, and 36.4% of workers expect AI to threaten their roles. Brick-and-mortar venues face pressure from rising fixed costs and shifting player preferences, with 50.2% of PC café operators expecting conditions to worsen in 2025. Regulation, including loot-box probability disclosure enforcement and youth access rules, is repeatedly cited as a constraint, and the report presents these developments as shaping the industry's near-term direction.