South Korean game companies are facing a crisis as they lose their home market to foreign companies. Foreign games are not only outpacing domestic games in sales rankings on Apple and Google app marketplaces, but they have also taken the top spots in usage.
According to statistics from mobile big data company IGAWorks’ Mobile Index on Feb. 6, half of the top 10 games in Google Play application sales are foreign-made as of Feb. 5. Notable among them are “Legend of Mushroom” at No. 2, “Genshin Impact” at No. 5, “Last War: Survival Game” at No. 6, “Brawl Stars” at No. 9, and “WOS: Whiteout Survival” at No. 10.
The situation is similar in the Apple App Store. The top-selling app is “Legend of Mushroom” by Chinese company Joy Nice Games. Also in the top sales ranks are foreign-made games: “Last War: Survival Game” at fourth, “WOS: Whiteout Survival” at sixth, “Royal Match” at eighth, “Brawl Stars” at ninth, and “Survivor.io” at 10th.
“Legend of Mushroom” topped the weekly sales rankings for the fourth week of January, surpassing “Lineage M” by NCSoft, a stalwart in the domestic mobile game market. Released in December last year, “Legend of Mushroom” is an idle game that features growing mushroom characters into human characters. It has been praised for capturing the hearts of busy modern people with its simple graphics and controls.
Recently, the South Korean gaming market has been particularly affected by the aggressive push of Chinese games. Aside from “Brawl Stars” by Finland’s Supercell, four non-domestic games on Google Play are Chinese. Similarly, on the App Store, four games are Chinese, excluding “Brawl Stars” and the Turkish-developed “Royal Match.” “Brawl Stars,” a mobile shooting game released in 2018, has been popular for a long time with its cute characters, and “Royal Match” is a puzzle game.
In the industry, Chinese games are considered to be on par with South Korean games regarding creativity and technical capabilities. Games like “Genshin Impact,” which generates billions of dollars in revenue worldwide, prove this. Moreover, as the Chinese government intensifies its regulation of the game industry, more Chinese games are targeting the South Korean market. Users are inevitably drawn to the novelty and volume offensive of Chinese games.
“Brawl Stars” was the sole game to exceed 2 million monthly active users (MAU, across both iOS and Android platforms), securing the top spot in MAU rankings among all game-related apps. MAU is a vital app evaluation metric that shows how many users have used an app within a month. Last month, the American game “Roblox,” popular among teenagers, took second place in the game category MAU.
