NCsoft President Interview

GamesIndustry.biz has published an interview with NCsoft president and CEO TJ Kim about the global growth of online gaming and the success of his massively multiplayer company. Check it out:

Q: NCsoft has operations around the world – in Asia, North America and in Europe – but more than half of your revenues still come from the Korean market. How do you see the relationship between those territories, in revenue terms, changing in the coming years?

A: Our target is to make NCsoft into a true global company. As you know, the population of Korea is very small, and the size of the industry is small because of this. That’s the main reason for Korean companies to go to a broader market.

When Korean people are educated, from young children, we believe that we should aim for outside Korea, not just inside Korea – so when I made NCsoft, one of my dreams was to make a company for the global market, not just for the Korean market. When I created Lineage, the first thing I did was to move the game into foreign countries – the first foreign country was Taiwan.

At the time, NCsoft was not big. It was a very small company. But even at that, we moved into the USA; Richard and Robert Garriott joined NCsoft about five years ago. We went to the USA, Taiwan and other Asian countries at that time – and right now, we have development offices in several countries. We have three development studios in the USA, four studios in Korea, one studio in Beijing, and we want to set up in other countries, including Europe.

I believe that in three years, NCsoft will have a development studio in every country where we publish our games – and in that studio, the developers will develop online games specially focused on that market. Globally is the only way for NCsoft to survive in this market.