Netmarble Games Founder Bang Jun-hyuk speaks about the company's global mobile game market strategy during a press conference at the G Valley Convention Hall in Guro-dong, southwestern Seoul, Thursday. / Courtesy of Netmarble Games



By Yoon Sung-won



Netmarble Games, the nation's leading mobile device game company, pledged to launch more titles overseas and acquire promising development studios to compete globally.



Founder Bang Jun-hyuk said he anticipates the company will achieve 1 trillion won ($870.47 million) in annual sales earlier than expected on the back of steady growth it has recorded in the mobile game business.



"We have set the goal of becoming a global enterprises and record over 1 trillion won sales by 2016. I expect the company will reach the goal within this year as the company has continued to grow even now and is expected to do so in the coming quarters," Bang said during a press conference in Seoul, Thursday.



The company posted 203.4 billion won in sales in the first quarter, exceeding NCSOFT's 188.1 billion won for the first time on the back of a better-than-expected performance of its game "Raven."



He stressed that game companies must prepare for global competition in the mobile sector.



"Mobile games are different from PC games. Whereas the infrastructure and environment for the PC game market may vary by regions, mobile devices distributed worldwide are more standardized and universal," Bang said.



Since last year, Netmarble has pushed into the global mobile game market and established branch offices and subsidiaries in overseas countries such as China, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and the United States. It also acquired a local game company in Turkey.



Established in March 2000, the company had been one of the most successful online game firms here until the mid-2000s.



But it went downhill after Bang left the post due to health problems in 2006. None of its games was successful in the market between 2007 and 2011 and it lost the license to provide the first person shooter game "Sudden Attack," its biggest cash cow, to Nexon.



When Bang returned to Netmarble in 2011, he pushed for aggressive changes, including what he called "strategic and numerical management," and turned the company's focus to mobile games.



In 2014, Netmarble attracted 533 billion won from Chinese IT giant Tencent. It was the largest foreign investment ever made into Korea's content industry.



Adding to a series of domestic market successes with mobile games including "Everyone's Marble," "Monster Taming" and "Seven Knights," the company established a partnership with NCSOFT in February and gained access to NCSOFT's game intellectual properties.



Bang said the company is currently working on collaboration projects with NCSOFT as well as on the initial public offerings of its game development subsidiaries.



"We have two projects under way in cooperation with NCSOFT," he said. "We are also working to list promising game development subsidiaries to help them seek sustainable growth and become a global enterprise."



The company plans to list Netmarble N2 and Netmarble Monster first.



Bang said the company will unveil a new game software development kit tentatively named "Columbus" in order to boost its game development capability. It has an embedded artificial intelligence engine to allow detailed in-game services tailor-made for each gamer.



Bang expected that the domestic mobile game market will be more polarized between casual games and more serious ones.



"The market here will be perfectly polarized in the next six months. Casual games will be simpler with instant entertainment, whereas the more serious games will be more complicated and detailed," he said.



Netmarble Games Vice President Paek Young-hoon said the company has launched 15 new mobile games so far this year and plans to roll out 31 more by the first half of next year. The genres of the new titles will range from role-playing, puzzles to sports, he said.



One of them, tentatively called "Project S," is being developed based on the backgrounds of NCSOFT's role-playing game "Lineage 2."