The business model for subscriptions exists now – we'll be using it for World Poker Tour 2 for example. So could Heroes Lore 2 work over here, with all this connectivity? There's a data charge per battle, too, but it's moving towards a single monthly subscription payment that includes all data charges and unlimited battles.īy January, when I was last over there, the game had been downloaded by 650,000 people, of whom 400,000 had connected, which is really impressive. Players get seven network battles a day free, but pay around ten cents for an extra ten network battles.
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It costs the equivalent of $3 to download Heroes Lore 2. How much do people pay to play it and access these features? People are making real money from this too: one guy made $650 in a week from just selling items. Between those two features, the game is generating 450,000 network battles a day.Īnd then the third connected element is item-trading, where you can create your own magic items, and then go on the website or through the game itself and trade them with other people. Then there's Player v Player, where you have just one-on-one combat online and win honour points. So it has Guilds, where you join a Guild and can take part in the community, as well as engaging in Guild v Guild combat where you fight two-on-two battles online, and get experience points.
It's more about dipping in and out to use the connectivity. Yes, but the sequel, Heroes Lore 2, is connected, and it's exploded in Korea – it got more than 100,000 downloads in its first week of release, and was the most-searched term on the Korean equivalent of Google.Īctuallly, I'd call it semi-connected, as it's not about solid connected periods of time, like playing an EverQuest or World Of Warcraft where you walk around the game world and are always connected. It's sold massively, and even spawned its own manga comic series. So you have your character, which you have to level up, and there's a rich environment with loads of creatures, spells and weapons. What's it about?Įffectively it's a big RPG, very much in the style of Zelda-type games on the Game Boy Advance.
You're releasing Heroes Lore here in Europe, which has been hugely popular in Korea. The games are typically very beautiful because of the larger file-sizes, but they're 2D. Lastly, a really interesting thing about Korea is that 3D has completely failed there. Also, people are mad about PCs over there, and they all play RPGs, which are huge. That's a big difference, as well as the fact that the games are a lot quirkier, which is shown in something like Sushi Mania. So graphically, Korean games tend to be very rich, because they have more space to work with, even though the handsets aren't actually as powerful as the ones over here – their CPU speed isn't as quick.
The average Java file size is around 700KB, whereas over here operators often impose a download-size limit of 250KB. What are the big differences between Korea and the West, for mobile gaming? James Kaye: The main thing is that Koreans have the luxury of much larger download sizes. We grabbed Hands-On's James Kaye for a chat to talk about the comparison between Europe and South Korean games, as well as to find out more info on the company's plans for bringing its Heroes Lore RPGs and Sushi Mania casual game West.
At least, that's the implication of this week's news that Hands-On Mobile is launching a 'Best of Korea' initiative, to bring some of its most popular games there over here. Yet when it comes to mobile gaming, it seems that South Korea and the West are closer than you'd think.
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After all, while we're still squinting at grainy streaming TV over 3G, South Korea has already rolled out proper digital mobile television broadcasts. You'd be forgiven for thinking South Korean mobile technology is light years ahead of ours.