No building relations with Apple required, no porting required, no deck placement negotiation required since they were ranked in order of sales, and easy access for the users to see the screenshots and reviews. The App Store actually fixed all of these issues. For this reason, branded games did extremely well even if they weren't the best products. Users had to make decisions on what games to buy just based on the name of the game.
Most of the carriers back then couldn't even show screenshots, and it was extremely difficult for the users to see if it is a good game or not. Finally, we had to get a premium deck placement in order to get a certain amount of attention on the carrier's deck. Getting to know all the hundreds of devices took a long time, and developers had to fly back and forth from Korea to do this since the phones couldn't be tested in Korea. The next thing that we had to do, was to port to all the devices available on the market. This was a very long and lengthy process. Kyu Lee: when we first came to the US market from Korea, one of the first things that we had to do, is building a relationship with the carrier. What do you think of the App Store system, from a developer's perspective-its opportunities, its flaws, etc? What makes it unique, compared to other platforms? Most of the higher-priced titles in the App Store don't make it into the Top 100 of those that do, most have big brands behind them. There was a large amount of interest from the user communities when we first announced that we will bring ZENONIA to the App Store.īonnie: You said that you thought that the App Store gave original titles a better chance of succeeding.
Kyu: Well I definitely feel there were needs but just that the publishers haven't been serving them yet. I haven't seen anything remotely close to Zenonia, quality-wise, in the U.S.
iPhone was more than enough to bring the technology over, and we felt that chances of original titles to succeed on the App Store was higher.īonnie: Interesting-it sounds like Korean consumers are more demanding than American ones, at least in regards to RPGs. ZENONIA is still not able to run on most of the regular J2ME phones out in the market. Unfortunately, due to the file, heap size restrictions and business restrictions, it has been a tough journey to break through the US market with an RPG game. ZENONIA was a project decided to be done after we launched our multiplayer network game, "Path of a Warrior". We have been developing RPG games ever since we launched "Last Warrior" in 2001, the first RPG mobile game in Korea, which was less than 50KB. We "had" to make good RPG games in order to survive through the tough competition. One of the most popular categories in South Korea is Role-Playing Games, and it is an extremely competitive category. Kyu Lee (Gamevil): We've been developing and publishing mobile games since 2000 in South Korea.
Parts of this interview were also used in my Search for Satisfaction editorial, but there's plenty of additional content here!īonnie Eisenman (148apps): Hi, Kyu, and thanks for taking the time to do this! For starters, what inspired you guys to make Zenonia? I don't just mean "why make an RPG"-I mean, "why make a good RPG?" He has some really interesting and intriguing insights-it's not often that we get to hear things from a mobile game developer's point of view. The president of Gamevil USA, Kyu Lee, generously agreed to answer a few questions about Zenonia, Gamevil, and the App Store in general. While the Korean-based company has only released two games in the US App Store so far (the other Baseball Superstars), both have been very well-received. I recently had the chance to review their latest game, Zenonia, and it blew me away you can read my review here, but suffice to say that I thought it clearly surpassed other RPGs in the App Store. Gamevil is the fantastic company behind Zenonia and Baseball Superstars.
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