[MUSAI] Have you ever played a Korean console game? – “Buried Stars”, the trigger for the popularity of the Korean console

2020-08-06

Line Games released a console game named “Buried Stars” on July 30 and it was sold out as soon as released. “Buried Stars” is a mystery adventure game, available on PS4, PS Vita, and Nintendo Switch exclusively. People have been highly excited even before it launched since the title is the first comeback in several years of Jin Seungho, a famous developer among the Korean gamers.

PC and mobile hold a dominant position in the Korean gaming market traditionally, so it may be a high risk to launch a console game as for a game developer. Besides, the text adventure genre is not a kind of popular genre. We found out an interesting comment in the interview from the production director Jin Seungho on this subject.

“My concern about the business model was gone once I decided to build a game for console platform.”

The domestic PC market is already full, and the business model of mobile games became too complicated. In the face of these difficulties, it seems a smart way to solve the concern about the business model.

“The reason I attached various languages is that there must be a limitation if targeting Korea only. I was clearly aware of it.”

He was also aware that the genre of his game, a text adventure, is not common. What he did to overcome the limitation of genre was localization in various languages to expand target markets. The game was localized in 4 languages (CCJK) and added the Japanese voiceover with famous Japanese voice actors as well to target Japan and China.

The popularity and success of “Buried Stars” gave us a chance to think about the Korean console market in many ways.

We mentioned that the growth of the Korean cosole market is “Green light” in our previous article (http://blog.musaistudio.com/the-korean-console-market-green-light-with-a-high-growth-rate) The Korean console market is getting larger with a high growth rate in the circumstance of the Korean gaming market focused on PC online (mostly MMORPG) and mobile games.

Especially, the export of console games are increasing rapidly. In addition, the major game companies in Korea (Nexon, Netmarble, Ncsoft and etc) have kept preparing the console market and getting ready to launch their console titles. For example, ‘Fusers’ by NCsoft, ‘Seven Knights’ by Netmarble, ‘Kartrider Drift’ by Nexon, and ‘Crossfire X’ by SmileGate’ are about to lauch. Thoes movement brought the expectation that the scale of the Korean console market and its export revenue will be expanded remarkably in a few years.

‘‘Buried Stars” is a special game not only for the Korean console market but also for Musai Studio. We worked on both Japanese and Korean voice over for ‘Buried Stars’ and it was meaningful for us since it’s a second project collaborated with Director Jin. We have worked on his previous game, ‘City of Mist 2 (회색도시 2)’ 5 years ago and it was another great work. We’d appreciate to have a chance to work on this well-made Korean console again. We strongly believe “Buried Stars” will be loved by global gamers as well, and it’s going to be a trigger to prove the potential of the Korean console games in the global market.

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