IT: How long have you been the chairman of the Korea Game Developers Association
B: Three years. I am the second chairman. The first chairman held the title from around six years ago up through 2005. And I started as the second chairman of the KGDA in 2006.
IT: I listened in on a couple of the speeches. There were some questions at the end that implied Korea doesn't have many independent game developers. Is that the case
B: Yeah. Actually, there were many independent game developers in Korea in the 90s. But after the millennium there was a huge expansion of the game industry in Korea, like NCsoft and Nexon etc., and they were too busy and they needed too many developers. They gathered all the developers for their companies, and now there are only a few indie developers left in Korea.
IT: Do you think that's a good thing
B: Nope! It's not good.
IT: Why not
B: Because a large company with many people can only develop safe games, not radically different ones. They can only make what you have seen before. If you make a game in the style of Lineage, World of Warcraft, or Diablo, it is very safe because it is already proven to be a very good game.
IT: Yes, like Aion, it looked a whole lot like World of Warcraft.
B: Yeah, I think so. That is the weakness of the major game developers. And so, indie game developers must develop their own special games, they must develop the uncommon and sometimes very radical games. But there's no... almost too few developers. And they can't develop, evolve the genre.
IT: That's what the KGC [Korea Games Conference 2008] was about, right Finding the 5th generation of gaming Trying to make a revolution
B: Yes, trying to make a revolution. I think these games, like MMORPGs and etc., are at the end of their generation. Because it gets too extreme. Aion looks like World of Warcraft, and other games too. We feel that we have to change something, but our people don't want to play console games like before, like other markets' major thing. So we must not make console games, like before, and not MMO games either. So what's next If not these online games, not those console games, then what So that's why we are searching for the 5th game generation. It can be new platforms like XNA, or Flash, or the iPhone; it can be the next platform.
