• Interview with GAMEVIL’s Kyu Lee

    09/09/2009

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    Posted in: IPhone, Interview

    I get the chance to chat with Kyu Lee, president of Gamevil, at PAX 2009 about Zenonia and their upcoming game HYBRID: Eternal Whisper. Thanks, Kyu!

    Cat: Like Zenonia, HYBRID: Eternal Whisper is a port of a Korean title, what have been the challenges in that process?

    Kyu: For Zenonia, when we port over the game, in the past we spent more time on handling the technical issues and porting it over, but now that we’re getting more and more familiar with it, now we’re spending more time on how to make it really fit the iPhone platform. I know that a lot of people are complaining that it looks like a port, and some people aren’t really comfortable with the D-pad. I personally don’t think we have to use the acellerometer just because it’s there, and sometimes the D-pad might make more sense. We’re trying to make it as intuitive as possible. Like if you look at hte menu navigation in Zenonia you have to do everything with the D-pad, which is pretty uncomfortable in some ways so we changed that all to touch for HYBRID, so we’re spending a lot more time compared to the original. If you look at the original version now compared to the new version of HYBRID, it’s significnatly different.

    Cat: You guys are not shy about content or depth. How do you make that work for mobile, a platform often characterized – at least in America – by abbreviated gameplay?

    Kyu: The difference that you have to understand is the platform difference. In America, they usually have Java. Java is not native code, so it requires more processing if it was the same hardware if it was C. So there’s a programming language difference, and I think that’s the biggest hurdle. In Korea we used to have Java in the past but we also had native language, but everything switched to native language. Here in the US for a regular mobile game the file sizes would be somewhere around 1 MB, something like that, in Korea it’s getting bigger and bigger these days. When we bring titles over to the US for carrier games, like for the feature phones, we have to cut out a lot of the parts of the games. I don’t think we’re able to do that anymore unless it’s a smartphone like iPhone or Windows Mobile phone.

    HYBRID: Eternal Whisper

    HYBRID: Eternal Whisper

    Cat: The games you guys bring to the iPhone are really epic in scale, in what other ways do you think you’re legitimizing the device as a gaming platform?

    Kyu: Like Zenonia, people might underestimate it just because it’s a mobile game, but we have five to six people working on it eight up to nine months. So it’s not a small team, and those are the smaller games. The bigger games we have almost up to ten people involved in the project. It’s not like a one or two man shop, and there’s a lot of art that’s involved, a lot of story in order to make the scale of the game big. I think that’s the way we’re legitimizing it, but how we’re differentiating it is a little bit different. I think we bring different flavor to the table. I think there’s a lot that you’re getting from the Western companies, but we’re bringing something more anime. That seems to be the key difference between our titles and the others that you see on the AppStore.

    Cat: Are there any plans for online features?

    Kyu: Yes. Actually, (laughs) when we were bringing over the titles we’ve been removing the online features just because we wanted to take a step by step and careful approach to the platform. Now that we’re getting more comfortable with the platform we’re planning on doing more and more. I think all the titles that you’ll see from now on will have at least a small online feature to begin with. It also has to do with the mobile environment in the past. We were one of the first companies to develop a location-based MMORPG. That was back in 2002 or 2003. What we saw is that the users had to pay a lot of data fees just because they were connected to the mobile network all the time while they were playing, so it wasn’t a commercial success. We actually tried to reduce that. We also tried to introduce new building models with the carriers where we could package a flat fee for a game when it comes to network games. Things are changing. More and more people are getting unlimited data here in the US, and if you’re a smartphone user like theiPhone you have connectivity all the time and you’re always under unlimited data plan, so people start not to think about that anymore and for a mobile publisher like us it makes it easier for us to build more games with connectivity.

    HYBRID: Eternal Whisper

    HYBRID: Eternal Whisper

    Cat: What about in-app purchases, which are very big in Korea but not so big here?

    Key: I think Korea had an advantage where the customers were accustomed to doing in-app purchases through online PC games. Just because they are accustomed to that it was easier for them to introduce the new model on the mobile platform, but here in the US I think people are getting used to it more and more. It’s still kind of a new concept if you look at the general audience. I feel like with all the social games and with all the free to play games here in the US we might be able to introduce that. We’re just too cautious! (laughs) We’re gonna do that. I don’t think it’s a key element of the game. We’re probably going to make it an optional feature because we don’t want to piss off our customers if it’s something you really have to get.

    Cat: So in place of in-app purchases are you thinking instead of launching separate game content entirely, I’ve heard you talk about sequels in place of purchasing from within an existing game?

    Kyu: It’s probably going to be purchasing within an existing game, and it’s probably going ot be items, not like levels. There was a lot of trial and error in the beginning, also in the Korean mobile games market when they first introduced in-app purchases people started selling levels and you couldn’t even clear the game if you didn’t do in-app purchases. That actually led to a lot of bad reviews. I think if you look at all the free to play games that come out of Korea they’re probably not like things that you have to have, but it’s just better to have.

    Cat: Mad Monkey Studio recently announced their intention to develop for 3GS only. What’s your take on this split, and is that something you see yourselves doing?

    Kyu: I think that they’re putting themselves in a unique position. If you want to ake advantage of the fast speed of the 3GS and you have to have that, then it’s something you might want to do. From a business point of view I think it might be easier in the future, but in the current situation I think that it’s too early to do that. Well, (laughs) if you say it in a good way, you say I want to target a broader audience. If you say it in a bad way it doesn’t make enough revenue. Revenues are important, we have to pay people in order to make better games!

    Cat: What changes to the app submission process would you like to see?

    Kyu: I think quicker turnaround is something that we’d like to have. I think that other than that we didn’t have many issues with Apple except for how long we had to wait and we can’t announce our launch date.

    Cat: You never really get a launch date!

    Kyu: No, we announce a submission date! (laughs) So I think quicker turnaround would be good. I also saw people talking about express testing, like if you could pay in order to get it tested quicker. I think companies who have urgent issues would like to do that. Another thing that i did want to mention is about the number of reviews that are on the deck. When you update a title the number gets reset to the new version so it kind of looks like a newer game. You can read through all the reviews from the past version on the deck, but just by looking at the title and the number underneath it you can’t see that. I’ve heard that some publishers have been saying that if they submit a new version that number is going to go down to zero and it might not look as good as having thousands of reviews on a title.

    Cat: With 20,000 words translated for Zenonia, do you guys have a tally for Eternal Whisper?

    Kyu: we haven’t done the word count because of where we are in the localization. We did the word count for Zenonia just to get the estimated cost to translate, but for HYBRID I don’t have the number.

    Cat: Because 20,000 is a lot…

    Kyu: Yeah, and it’s larger than that for HYBRID. The localization cost is also bigger compared to other games. That was kind of our hesitation, but for Zenonia we are going to support additional languages. No set date, one language at a time. We have all the localized text.

    HYBRID: Eternal Whisper

    HYBRID: Eternal Whisper

    Cat: Any plans for working on an RPG for the iPhone from the ground-up in the USA?

    Kyu: I think it will come pretty soon. If you look at the sales that we generate from Korea on a single title compared to sales that we generate for the iPhone, still Korea is significantly larger. From an ROI perspective, it doesn’t make sense to develop an iPhone game from the ground up. It would if there were more iPod Touches and iPhones out in the market but for now it only makes sense if we do a short development title. If we were going to build something big like Zenonia it’s probably going to come first in Korea and then expand to the US. You know, like iPod Touch users and iPhone users are growing very significantly. Nobody announced it but I think that everybody is assuming there’s going to be a new iPod Touch out this fall and with that maybe a price reduction on the previous one, just looking at Apple’s history.

    Cat: We’ll know this week!

    Kyu: Yeah, so if that happens, the audience might grow larger. If there’s more audience then it may make more sense commercially. Another thing is if we expand to other platforms, like if you look at Gameloft they have Heroes of Sparta coming also for the PSP, I’m not sure if they have it for Xbox Live Arcade; but if there’s away to expand the same title to multiple platforms so we could hit a larger audience then it could make sense to build something from the ground up here.

    Cat: Are you guys looking at Minis for the Go?

    Kyu: We’re looking into it. No commitment yet. Everybody’s looking into it. (laughs)

    Cat: I guess it depends on how easy it is to port.

    Kyu: There are a lot of PSPs in the market. I’m not sure how many people will play through the digital downloads on PSN for the Mini games because if you look at the PlayStation Network you can get PlayStation games at a pretty cheap price and those are pretty deep so the competition is also pretty steep in that sense. We’re factoring that in and we’re also factoring in the development costs as you mentioned. I think it’s good for a company like us, we’re very new to the US market, it’s good for a company like us to have some type of establishment in the console space. iPhone was one of our first steps, but if we had something for the DSi or PSP, that would be good.

    Cat: I have questions from our members on N4G and Flynn wanted to know just that, if you see yourselves moving in that DSiWare and PSP Mini direction.

    Kyu: For newcomers like us in the US market I don’t think we’ll be good at retailing anything, anything that actually needs a shelf space. If it’s anything that can be done digitally it’s very convenient, it’s just like uploading a file, pretty similar process, and we don’t have to have a huge sales team here. We can actually just have a couple people talking to Sony and a couple testers testing the game through the network, and everything can be done in Korea, too, so why not? We’re thinking of it, but at the same time we only have two titles on the iPhone (laughs), so I think there are more people asking for more titles on the iPhone than there are people asking for the existing titles to be expanded to other platforms.

    Cat: Flynn also wants to know if there were any plans to port games like Art of War or the Boom Boom series?

    Kyu: We are looking into our back catalog. We only do about ten titles a year in Korea, and if we do ten titles a year maybe half of them won’t work. So it might be like five titles a year here for the US market, and we’re also looking into our back catalogs to see which games might make sense. We want to be a little bit more experimental, like every game that we launch is role-playing, we might want to try out a couple of casual games just to see how it works and check out different price points, just to see how it works. The iPhone is very interesting and I think we’re enjoying experimenting with the AppStore and the iPhone device.

    HYBRID: Eternal Whisper

    HYBRID: Eternal Whisper

    Cat: Any likely candidates from your back catalog?

    Kyu: (laughs) I can’t mention anything.

    Cat: Had to try and sneak that in there! Thank you so much for your time, I like what you guys are bringing to the iPhone.

    Kyu: I hope that you like it, I wish that we could do better.

    Cat: Do better? You sound like you are your biggest critic. What would you like to change?

    Kyu: Move a little bit faster and polish a little bit more.

    Thanks again to Kyu Lee for his time, and be sure to look for our coverage of GAMEVIL’s upcoming iPhone title HYBRID: Eternal Whisper.

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