Korean app market One Store vows to go global in 2022 with more popular games

[Photo provided by One Store]

South Korea's home-grown app market One Store will launch global services next year by actively attracting popular game apps from big publishers and developers such as Blizzard and Nexon with a goal of more than quadrupling its revenue by 2025.

During an online vision presentation, the company’s chief executive Lee Jae-hwan said One Store is fast growing and will launch global services starting 2022 with a goal to rake in 700 billion won ($597.3 million) in revenue by 2025, 4.5 times higher from about 150 billion won last year.

One Store plans to enrich its content repository in the game sector to woo overseas users. Its goal is to double revenue by attracting more than 70 percent of the top 30 mobile games within three years. In collaboration with Blizzard, 'Diablo Immortal' will be released, for example. This will mark the first time of Blizzard launching on a third app market after Google Play and Apple’s App Store.

Its growth depends on how many top ranked games joined the homegrown app market, Lee said. In addition to Blizzard, Nexon will release some anticipated games on One Store in the fourth quarter this year.

One Store will soon introduce a cross-platform service that allows mobile games to be distributed and played on PC and other devices through Tencent Cloud Service.

[Photo provided by One Store]

One Store was established in 2016 as a collaboration between Korea’s three mobile carriers and portal operator Naver to break into the local app market dominated by Google and Apple.

The Android-based app has succeeded in steadily expanding its presence in the local app store market since its launch. It swung to the black in 2020 and maintained an operating profit in the first half of this year. The transactions in the first six months of this year totaled about 550 billion won on sales of 100.7 billion won.

The fast growth was attributed to its favorable fee policy. In 2018, One Store lowered its commission fee to 20 percent from 30 percent on all in-app purchases. The company permitted app developers’ operation of charging systems of their choose and cut the fee to 5 percent.

[ⓒ Maeil Business Newspaper & mk.co.kr, All rights reserved]