Online vs. Mobile
The Ministry of Culture, Sports & Tourism and the Korea Creative Content Agency announced on November 8 that the size of the South Korean game market grew 7.5% from a year ago and reached 10.72 trillion won (US$9.5 billion) last year, led by the expansion of the mobile game segment, and it is expected to exceed 11 trillion won (US$9.8 billion) this year.
The online game segment shrunk unlike the mobile game segment. Specifically, the latter showed a growth rate of 19.6% to account for 32.5% of the entire market. On the contrary, the former showed a negative growth of 4.7% and took up 49.2% of the market, dipping below 50% in terms of market share for the first time ever.
Last year, game exports from South Korea totaled US$3.214 billion, up 8.1% from a year earlier. Likewise, game imports increased 7.2% to US$177.49 million. 32.9% and 21.5% of the exports headed for the Greater China region and Japan, respectively. North America, Southeast Asia and Europe represented 17.2%, 11.2% and 10.8%, too. The exports to the North American and European markets increased 10.3 percentage points and 6.8 percentage points, respectively.