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By Yoon Sung-won
As of early September, more than 10 million copies of online video game “Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds” (PUBG) have been sold globally. This is a historic achievement not just for its developer Bluehole but also for the entire Korean game industry.
Citing Steve Jobs’ famous anecdote of “connecting the dots,” Bluehole founder Chang Byung-gyu underlined that the global success has been made through the experience the company has accumulated through past failures and desperate endurance for survival. Jobs said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
Under Chang’s vision to develop games that can be accepted worldwide, Bluehole, which was founded in March 2007, opened its U.S. subsidiary En Masse only a year later. The company successfully launched online game “Tera” in 2011. But it has had repeated market failures after that until this year.
“We had a difficult time surviving in the past years. But we have kept our eyes on the U.S. market and continued to invest in it for the last nine years,” the Bluehole founder said in an interview at the company’s office in Pangyo, Gyeonggi Province, Tuesday.
Chang said the idea to roll out the game through world’s largest game distribution platform Steam, which was a relatively unfamiliar channel in Korea, came from foreign employees of its U.S. unit.
“Such a sharing of ideas was possible thanks to the trusting and cooperating relationship among the members of the Korean headquarters and the U.S. subsidiary, not an authoritative and vertical corporate culture. I also believe this was behind PUBG’s global success,” he said. “But we never expected to have such extraordinary success. Our original goal was to sell 800,000 copies a year at best. The only thing we knew was that it was the right way to produce and release the game.”
The Bluehole founder also said extensive pool of talented human resources has made Korea one of the powerhouses in the global game industry.
“In North America, many talented software and network engineers seek to work for global IT giants such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook, not for game companies. But in Korea, many such talented people have entered the game industry since the boom of internet venture businesses in the late 90s,” he said. “PUBG’s executive producer Kim Chang-han also is one of the software engineers who entered the game industry at that time.”
Chang studied computer science in undergraduate and graduate courses at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology throughout the 90s. He was also one of the members who developed the internet search engine First Snow in 2005, which later helped Korea’s top web portal Naver improve its search engine.
As an expert in computer engineering, Chang picked the use of advanced server stabilization and optimization technologies as the prime strengths that make “PUBG” a good online game.
In PUBG, users become one of 100 people who land on an island. They are forced to do whatever it takes to survive in a “battle royal.” This means 100 users are connected in a game at the same time, doing dynamic actions. The game topped the Steam platform with over 1 million concurrent users.
“Ordinary server engines cannot easily handle 1 million concurrent users, even with the cloud technology,” he said. “Considering that the development of PUBG is not completed yet, I would say it is an impressive work for our server engines to cope with 1 million concurrent users.”
Political issue
Regarding China, which is the world’s fastest growing game markets, Chang asked the government to take political measures so as to protect Korean game companies from discrimination. Since the Korean government decided to deploy a U.S. missile defense system here, the Chinese government has avoided giving permission for Korean games to be released in the country.
“Now Chinese game companies have equal or even better development capabilities than Korean ones; but the Chinese market is incomparably larger than Korea’s domestic market,” he said. “Korean game firms need the government to stand up and prevent reverse discrimination in the cultural content sector. This is what the private sector cannot handle by itself.”
As an entrepreneur who previously founded multiple successful IT companies, Chang is considered more a team player than a lone maverick. He started Neowiz in 1997 with seven founding members and established venture capital Bon Angels in 2010 alongside two partners.
“At Bluehole, we have six to seven members who call ourselves cofounders. I always try to start a business with others because it is a tough task to do it alone,” he said. “Cofounding itself is not easy though. But once we do it right, we can minimize the risk of failure while maximizing the possibility of success with better ideas.”
As a leader of a business, Chang said he concentrates on supporting the employees to make the most of themselves, not for the company but for their own sake.
“We are a game company with annual salary system. Under this condition, employees can boost their own value by expanding their portfolio. What the company can do is to encourage them to work and improve their capabilities as much as they can on a completely voluntary basis.”