Korean gamers shift to idle RPGs, January revenue up 82%

(From left) “Legend of Mushroom” and “Soul Strike”

Idle role-playing games (RPGs) and hyper-casual games are gaining popularity among Korean gamers, with revenue surging and indicating a shift away from the mainstream genre of competitive RPGs in the Korean mobile game market.

According to a report released by Korean mobile application market tracker IGAWorks on Tuesday, revenue from idle RPGs in the Korean iOS and Android app markets in January 2024 totaled 67.7 billion won ($50.8 million), an increase of 82.5 percent compared to January of the previous year.

Revenue from the hyper-casual genre games increased by 39.4 percent to 28.2 billion won over the same period, while revenue from the multiplayer online battle arena games increased by 162 percent to 11 billion won.

The increase in revenue from idle RPGs was attributed to the contribution of 10 games, including “Legend of Mushroom” by Joy Nice Games, “Soul Strike!” by Com2us Holdings Corp., and “Ragnarok Begins” by Gravity Interactive Inc.

The average daily revenue of these games was about 1.4 billion won on the Google Play store as of February 18th, 2024, or 22 times higher than the average revenue of existing games in the same genre, which was 6.54 million won.

Chinese-developed “Legend of Mushroom” in particular maintained an upward trend for an extended period with revenue rising to around 10.4 billion won in the eighth week from around 2.3 billion won in the first week of release.

Among hyper-casual games, “Last War: Survival” by First Fun stood out, with its January revenue accounting for 14.2 billion won, which is 49.8 percent of the revenue of similar games.

Games like “Survivor.io” by Habby Pte. and “Doodle Magic: Wizard vs Slime” by MOREFUN（H.K.) Ltd. followed, with 3.8 billion won and 1.5 billion won in January 2024 revenue respectively.

On the other hand, the top 3 genres in revenue in January 2023 all saw a decrease in revenue a year later.

Revenue from competitive RPGs focused on player-versus-player play totaled 165 billion won in January 2024, a decrease of 6.3 percent compared to the same period the year before, while revenue from strategy and turn-based RPGs decreased by 30.7 percent to 40 billion won and revenue from subculture games plummeted by 41.6 percent to 26 billion won.