No Korean firms make it onto Korea’s top five mobile games list

No South Korean game titles developed by domestic game developers made it onto the list of the country’s top five mobile games last month, industry data showed on Friday.

According to mobile game market research firm IGAWorks, there were no Korean games among the leading five mobile games in terms of monthly active users (MAU) in August.

Brawl Stars, a multiplayer online battle arena and third-person hero shooter video game developed and published by Finnish video game company Supercell, topped the list with 2.07 million MAUs.

Supercell is a Finnish subsidiary of Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings Ltd.

Roblox, an online game platform and game creation system developed by Roblox Corp., came in second with 1.8 million MAUs, followed by Royal Match, developed by Turkish company Dream Games, with 1.54 million; Teamfight Tactics, an auto battler game developed and published by Riot Games, with 1.4 million MAUs; and Minecraft, a game developed and published by Mojang Studios, with 970,000.

The highest-ranking Korean game was Lucky Defense, developed by 111Percent Inc., with 960,000 MAUs, placing 6th.

CHINESE FIRMS ALSO PERFORM IN SALES REVENUE

Chinese mobile game developers also performed well in terms of sales revenue.

The highest-grossing mobile game was Korean game developer NCSOFT Corp.'s Lineage M, which posted 43 billion won ($32 million) in sales last month.

Road Nine, released by Korean game company Smilegate in July, ranked third with 22.6 billion won.

Chinese games occupied the second, fourth and fifth spots: Last War earned 38.2 billion won, followed by WOS with 20.7 billion won and AFK Journey with 20.3 billion won.

The three Chinese games outperformed Korean game maker Kakao Games Corp.'s Odin, which earned 17.2 billion won, and NCSOFT’s Lineage W with 9 billion won.

"Chinese companies have diversified game genres and launched aggressive marketing, which led to increased user bases and revenue growth,” said an industry official.

OVERSEAS MARKETS

Chinese games are also performing better than Korean rivals in overseas markets.

At Gamescom 2024, Europe's largest gaming exhibition held in Cologne, Germany Aug. 21-25, the Chinese game Genshin Impact, an action role-playing game developed and published by miHoYo, won the award for best mobile game.

Only three Korean games made it to the nomination stage. 

Black Myth: Wukong, an action role-playing console and PC game developed and published by Game Science on Aug. 20, saw a peak of around 2.42 million concurrent users on the PC game platform Steam.

This is the second-highest on record, following Korean game company Krafton’s PUBG: Battlegrounds, which set the record with 3.25 million concurrent users in 2018.

Write to Ju-Hyun Lee at 2juhyun@hankyung.com

In-Soo Nam edited this article.