Innovation and Strategy of Online Games

In the global game industry where the U.S. has already established its strong position in PC game and Japan in console game, Korea successfully opened new territory and began to play an important role in the global game industry with a new and emerging product - the online game. This book focuses on this interesting phenomenon and suggests that innovation, which led to the shift from the offline game to the online game, is the rationale behind this. Based on field data gathered through direct investigations with Korean game developers as well as the U.S., Southeast Asian, Chinese and Japanese companies, this book unveils diverse strategies of game companies and presents cognitive differences toward the online game business where various convergences will occur between the online game and other Internet businesses.This book focuses on the innovative factors which made the online game, born in a small Asian country, grow tremendously and successfully to gain competitiveness in the global game industry where the PC and console games had already taken their strong position. Based on authentic, accumulated research conducted over five years in the domain of the online game industry through interviews, case studies and international surveys, the data in this book has huge value since the results were derived from users' data with the cooperation of each game industry.