Nexon America’s Min Kim: Bridging the East-West Divide, and Aiming for a Younger Demographic

By Steven Crews | October 7, 2009 | | Filed under: Features, Interviews

The MMO Gamer: At the moment all of Nexon’s current titles were developed in Korea, then brought over to the States, correct?

Min Kim: Yes, all of them right now. Except certain games like Combat Arms, where we work very closely with the development team, so you could say that we’re actually co-producing the game. Where a lot of the development actually is influenced by what the gamers want over here.

Combat Arms is a much bigger game here than in Korea.

The MMO Gamer: Whenever I come across a company like yours I like to pose this question, and most of them just flat out say: “No.”

Min Kim: [laughs] What’s the question?

The MMO Gamer: Will there ever come a point where we get I guess, you could call it a “hybrid MMO,” which is developed jointly and equally by both the North American and Korean offices of an MMO company, which targets both demographics simultaneously.

Rather than taking a game developed in the East and trying to Westernize it, or vice versa.

Min Kim: I would say yes. But for the development to happen, it would probably originally happen for a Western market. If we were to have ties to both, or bring both teams together, it would probably because we wanted to target North America and/or Europe.

I can definitely see that happening, I think we’re still trying to navigate these waters, and also have the market grow to a critical mass, where that kind of funding, for a project like that, would make more sense. We think we’re still pretty much on ground level right now, in terms of market potential.

One way to look at it, and what I’m waiting for, is you’ve had so much success with Club Penguin and things like that, that’s just basically warming kids up to using a mouse and keyboard.

Once they grow out of that, and they’re already used to asking their parents to subscribe to something like Club Penguin, and then you’ve got these kids whose parents won’t let them subscribe, and they have this pent up urge to play something online… those kids are going to turn into teens.

They’re going to be 15 at some point, and this is going to be a very natural type of environment for them, versus a lot of the players we got initially, they didn’t grow up with that.

Mike Crouch: In my experience, I came over here from NCsoft, they tried it a few years ago with the Ultima team, and the Lineage 2 team. They put them together, and the result was they had a big failure on their hands.

The MMO Gamer: They tried to get Richard Garriott to work on a hybrid Korean-American title?

Mike Crouch: Yes, they had the heads of the Lineage and Lineage 2 teams put their heads together with Garriott, and it just didn’t… they had to stop it at three years in. Scrap it, and roll out the Tabula Rasa game that ended up flopping anyway.

So, the hybrid question…

Min Kim: The hybrid question, actually, has a lot…I mean the difficulties with the hybrid is that there are a lot of cultural differences, even in the way that people work.

Not just how smart they are and how amazing they can be in game development. It’s just people that work in Korea and people that work in the States are very different in terms of how they work.

What you can say at a meeting or how meetings are used or how email is used is completely different. That’s actually one of the biggest culture shocks probably for people that start working on both sides.

Mike Crouch: Yeah, that is, I think, everyone’s dream but I think a worry for Min would be trying to please everybody, and then pleasing no one along the way.

Min Kim: Here in North America, this isn’t indicative of all Korean work processes or teams or how they work, but here in the States if I’m in a room and I feel comfortable, if I don’t like an idea or I think that it should go another way I can just say, “Hey, I think we should do this.”

Then we can have a brainstorm session. Whereas over there, I feel like if you want to say that, then you should meet with this guy separately and then talk about it first before you put them on blast in front of everybody because it’s kind of disrespectful.

The MMO Gamer: So, having said all that, for the foreseeable future is Nexon going to continue just exclusively localizing games coming out of the East?

Min Kim: No, actually in the near future I can see us potentially working on a Western title, depending on what your definition of “near” is. [laughs]

But I definitely see that there’s going to be tough times in terms of putting Eastern developers and Western developers together because that cultural gap is pretty big. And beyond that, the language gap is huge.

The MMO Gamer: It is huge. I can remember when the Eastern titles first began to make an appearance in the West, and most of them did not go over very well at all for that very reason.

A few games were so bad it was like they ran them through the Korean to English translator on Babelfish and pushed them out the door.

And I think that’s kind of sullied the entire genre of Eastern games in the eyes of people who have been playing as long as I have.

Min Kim: Well I think, at least in our localization process, we try not to do that. It’s to just put it through the conveyor belt and it comes out, you just take it for what it is.

A lot of the Eastern operators, they have Koreans that aren’t native in English translating their games and I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes.

On the surface, presentation wise, when you have bad translation it’s like “All your base are belong to us” kind of thing. Like it just doesn’t make sense.

And it makes it seems very hardcore and we try to avoid that. All the localization actually happens here. That’s one of our key strengths here in the Los Angeles office, is that translation happens here. All the localization, UI, all that stuff is handled here and we work with our developers on that, versus just letting the developers be free with it which is a big problem. Culturally they just wouldn’t understand stuff.

The MMO Gamer: Alright, I think we’re just about out of time. Thank you both very much for joining us, we appreciate it, and we hope to do it again some time.

Min Kim: Awesome, thanks.

Nexon’s latest game, Dungeon Fighter Online, is currently in open beta, and along with all of the other games in their line-up is free-to-play and can be downloaded at their official website.