October 29th, 2007 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Connected Gaming | No Comments »
Microtransactions are picking up really well in mobile gaming Mecca Korea as one third of the mobile games released on operator SK Telekom are enabled for in-game purchasing of content.
Microtransactions in Korea actually started as countermeasure to pirated games. With their early adoption of high speed internet connections, it was easy for consumers to download pirated games on their PC’s. This lead to a change where gaming companies started making PC games that required a server to play on. To beat the offline games, the online games started off as free downloads. Korean gaming companies then decided to introduce microtransactions in order to still earn money from their games.
Leading the market are Gamevil, Nexon Mobile and Com2Us where Gamevil has the highest amount of mobile games supporting microtransactions on the operators. In Korea, microtransactions work well as alternative to ad-funded mobile games when it comes to spreading mobile games to the end consumer. Gamevil’s NOM3 brought 40% in additional revenues thanks to microtransactions. There are even mobile games publishers that experiment with spreading mobile games as free downloads that need to rely purely on microtransaction revenues.
