Going global: Bringing giant games from South Korea to the West

[Music] hello everyone I'm from netmarble Boresha district I'm the CEO of netmarble EMEA region so today yeah I mean I'll talk about a couple of our games and of course our subject is going global but let me start with asking a question what's global in my opinion I mean I'm just in the middle I'm from Turkey so I can more freely observe the Asia and West the US and Europe so my observation is if an Asian company becomes extremely successful in Asia they say we are successful in Asia if a company in US or Europe they are very successful in Europe or us they say we are good so that's the major difference in this

global story so it's netmarble we are yes extremely successful in Asia and then we decided to go to Global's by conquering to west so the our adventure to global started like that let's marvel let me also give a brief information if you don't have any idea about that marble be more established at 2002 tone 2012 the company decided to shift to mobile so it was a perfect decision after shifting to mobile on 2013 and 14 we have launched several games they were first especially successful in Korea and then Southeast Asia Japan and then West step-by-step Marvel featured fight was our first really global successful game it's popular in every market in u.s. to Japan

also now you may remember our name as the major in of Sen James Dean now then their name changed and also we have a quiet car bomb on 2017 and then we had a very successful IPO around twelve billion u.s. dollar market cap so I'll share you a video from one of our most in it not it is our most successful so this mobile MMORPG game it's extremely successful in Korea than the game was launched in Japan and Southeast Asia became again very successful and around a year ago we launched the game in US and European markets in there you can experience the real MMORPG

gameplay in a mobile platform you can have 50 versus 50 guild battle so it's real time on mobile there are the right of PvP features in the game so it is developed by Unreal 4 engine which means only the high spec mobile devices can watch the game and till now we have more than 30 million downloads and our accumulated revenues over 1 billion US dollars only from damage to revolution so while coming to the West's what we did of course Asia and Western players they have significant differences I can say Asian players are more experienced more hardcore they know especially MMORPG

genre much better and there they can easily adopt new and complicated contents of course we did some UI chains for the game to look more Western we have added some some more PvE content but you can cooperate with your friends in the dungeons in the raids and also we have added some diverse PvP modes such as three versus three five versus five or twenty verses to 20 and we have especially changed the leveling system the game in Asia and the leveling is harder but in the Western built it's easier to get levels you can understand them you are dif better here so the guy has a mustache and darker

hair but the girl became blondie in the western built so no we have enhanced a better place what I observe the Asian players are more focused on the data the result what you get but the Western players also focused on the UI the image the feeling while they're playing so we have enhanced the place and also we have added some PvE features as mentioned and one of the strongest side of the game is the castle siege battle it is 50 versus 50 it's an extremely advanced content for a mobile MMORPG game but we have added a tutorial for the game again in Asia lamp players see such a content they spent time and effort to understand the content and to play the content but

before the West launched we of course we do lots of tests and listen the users and according to the feedbacks we decided to add a specific tutorial for this advanced content otherwise people would not understand and will not play also this a kind of habit in the in the West so the virtual pad in the Asia built as you see on the left side but the Western built as it's in the right hand side so we did lots of change in the game as you can see I can share just a few of them now let me share one more game this is our the most successful I mean in the long years the most successful game mood marbles mundo marble was a traditional Korean game Nannette marble launched the game as the mobile version on 2013 so in the last 5

years the game keeps in top 3 top 5 into worst case scenario top 10 in Korea so only in Korea we have heard 3 million downloads so if you think Korean market the total population 50 million so you can understand how it is in Korea but other than Korea we have 125 million downloads and over 500 million revenue so the game again first launched in Korea dance artist Asheer Japan and tan West under the different names so let me show you a couple of image so this is the Korean milk before in the West first we launched in Turkey and Middle East area so this cute characters would not be acceptable in the in the turkey and Middle Eastern because as you can see

the game looks like very childish maybe on this 8 to 10 12 years would play but on the other side the game is very complicated I can say the game is kind of mitko so the these characters are giving a totally wrong image so this this characters from Turkey and the others from the Arabic built but on the other side again on Asia for this is the build for Japan again the characters are very cute if you are using line these are the line characters or people love them but if you show these characters to a Western person they would never play I mean our target audience would never play also we we had to change before launching into the verse we had to change the game content a lot the problem was the tutorials so this is the

Korean meal tutorial is 19 minutes and in Korea people always follow the tutorial then coming to the Japan and Southeast Asia just some polishing so tutorial is 16 minutes so you trust people follow the tutorial learn from the tutorial but coming to the West people do not follow the tour so it makes a major change because of course it's easy to make a short tutorial instead of 90 minutes you will make six mess but it's not the problem the problem is if you have a six minute tutorial that means you cannot give all the contents at the first stage that's why you have to change the game when you remove some of the contents as you cannot share them in the tutorial you have to remove them but when you remove all these some of these contents are are the key contents for the retention for the loyalty engagement so while removing

these contents you are losing the power of the game you are losing the key features but if you put all of these damn people don't understand again you are losing the users so it was a really lemma so our office in Istanbul we have a pretty big team dedicated to that game and our studio in Korea we had long discussions so the game launched postponed more than six months because the team is trying to convince the Korean developers and a Korean developers explaining why the content should not be removed based on the data so it was a long long long discussion but yes six months six months further development and the game became a success [Music] I am an African Center is this a

detective okay I just want you to listen the second musica [Music] so as you can hear there are it's two different music so what we know when I especially when a new user comes to the game music is the first thing they hear so it is your first touching point so localizing music changing the music according to the users extremely

important to in my play the game or when you hear the music now it looks very simple and it looks very easy to do but on the other hand reaching to that final music also it it took a couple of months we worked with a couple of music studios in the West we get that lots of examples and then we did lots of focus group test and then we chose this music because it is the first point people touched to the game of course on the marketing side we do a lot of celebrity marketing and influencer marketing this is the lineage launch we use Conan O'Brien for in the launch Grand Lodge in us lineage to revolution sixty people fighting on the battlefield it's crazy

in our market so more than 250 Beach YouTube Instagram to YouTube this is this video is from twitchcon yes again this this is the core strategy while launching a game especially in the worst in the US market server t + influencer marketing and we always use more culture alized and localized marketing assets and what we see compared to the Asian characters the local characters generates almost two times more revenue and again this is a marketing campaign from Middle East you see we we give away

a Dodge Viper in Dubai it's pretty effective so it increases the especially revenue from the VIP users significantly so we do this campaign I say in every quarter and on the marketing side in Middle East I mean the major platform is the influencers Arabic people especially Saudi UAE people extremely consumed youth during the lunch of lineage to be also made that we tried the different campaign and the campaign was this is one of the most popular character in lineage and we manufactured that a pure gold item it's extremely expensive right away so I couldn't I mean I didn't like this

slide personally because it doesn't give a how big it is but when I carry it's really tough to carries huge is totally gold-plated and there was a competition and five I mean each team five people that's why the winning team would would get these statues so it was dedicated to the Arabic servers because Middle Eastern people love gold that was the idea it worked a lot it was a good campaign but the winning team is not from Middle East so everyone noticed the campaign and people from Russia Germany France all participated to the Arabic server and the winning team three of them from europe europe two from russia but we don't have any Arabic people in the winning and in global art strategy we we

are not focusing only one or two games we are we are focusing publishing of multiple games in multiple genres so fishing strike I explained you a myth called hardcore games but we have a few game as well so that's our strategy we we touch all the audience all the users so we try to catch the users from different journals well thank you very much if you have any questions wonderful any questions out there oh yes we have a question here hello Bella from SE B when you pick partners or or choose game developers whose games you want to

publish in for instance mia region what are the key factors there that you look at you mean the developers right yes if we use the example of nitro games yeah for instance well of course the studio should be talented the game should be good but the most important part for us is the partnership so if the studio is really willing to be partner with us if they are not just in rush to open the game to publish the game to enter the Grand Lodge it is not a net Marvel style if really studio understands how we work and if the studio is willing to cooperate in in our way in our philosophy then we are willing to partner with that as to do otherwise even if the game is looks great we

cannot because I had mentioned I mean if just to change your music it may take a couple of months in that marble we can spend six months just to polish the game just to make the tutorial better this is how we publish the game and when we feel the game is perfect then we open the game if the studio accepts that type of a partnership and workload of course then we'll build up love perfect studio [Music]