Trendy, easy games gain traction in Korean gaming market

[Courtesy of Netmarble]

Trend-sensitive “easy” games are becoming more popular in the South Korean gaming market amid the continuous dominance of mobile massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs).

According to app market analysis service Mobile Index Insight on Thursday, Netmarble Corp.’s mobile idle game Raising Seven Knights is a huge success, ranking in the top 10 in Google Play and Apple App Store sales for a month after its release last month.

Raising Seven Knights is an idle game based on Netmarble’s flagship intellectual property (IP), the Seven Knights series.

In an idle game, the gamer does not have to play the game and the character simply grows when left alone. The genre is known to be less difficult to develop and is often created by solo developers or small startups.

Netmarble noted the genre’s growing popularity several years ago and began developing the new game by incorporating the characters and world of its flagship IP, Seven Knights, according to sources.

NCSoft Corp., whose flagship game lineup includes adult-oriented MMORPGs, also recently released a mobile puzzle game named “Fuzz Up Army Toy.”

Like Raising Seven Knights, Fuzz Up Army Toy capitalizes on the popularity of existing puzzle games, such as Match 3 Puzzle Game.

Fuzz Up Army Toy took less time to produce and required fewer people to develop than NCSoft’s flagship Lineage series, but its easy gameplay made it the most downloaded game on the Korean app market on Monday.

Nexon Co. joined the trend by releasing Dave the Diver in June as part of its strategy dubbed “Big&Little,” which aims at developing and releasing large-scale games with high sales expectations simultaneously with new, experimental small and med-sized games.

Unusually for a recent Korean game, Dave the Diver was highly acclaimed by overseas critics and was a big success, being nominated in three categories for the Golden Joystick Awards, a prestigious game award ceremony in North America and Europe.

Some game publishers, in the meantime, have chosen to secure the rights to release the games of promising indie game makers.

In 2021, Neowiz Games Corp. signed a publishing deal with Wonder Potion, the maker of SANNABI, an action game set in a Joseon Dynasty-style science fiction universe and plans to release the game on the personal computer and Nintendo Switch platforms in November this year.

Smilegate Holdings Inc. is also working to discover promising domestic indie games and support the creator ecosystem via its own indie game platform, Stove Indy.

“Large-scale MMORPGs, which take at least two to three years to develop, are very risky when they fail and it is also difficult to cope with industry changes that occur during production,” an official from the game industry said. “There will be more attempts by large gaming companies with a solid source of income to target new trends or niches.”