3/11/2023 0 Comments Korean archeage map compared to us![]() ![]() Accordingly, many would probably assume it's the bigger earner. It's interesting to compare this against Guild Wars 2, which is, of course, far more visible to gamers in this hemisphere. Indeed, NCsoft's 2014 financial reports tell us it generated a very healthy amount of revenue, approximately $240 million. In Korea, the venerable MMOG is alive and well. This is a rather NIMBY-esque point of view. After all, the servers for this region were shut down over four years ago. ![]() Here in North America, it's easy to regard Lineage as defunct. Accordingly, although his name may not have top of mind familiarity for many gamers in this part of the world, he rates inclusion on any list of developers who might be considered the “fathers” of our favorite genre. The team leader was Jake Song, who had been a principal on Nexus TK. Released in the fall of 1998, it was the title that established another Korean company we all know, NCsoft. This is the original appellation of the seminal MMORPG we far more often refer to as either Lineage or Lineage 1. It was also a trailblazer in distributed server architecture, setting a record in 1999 by surpassing 12,000 users in a single world. I have qualms as to whether any such scheme would work in a new release of any size, but the title was definitely a pioneer in this regard. The feeling of power must be pretty appealing some influential players have reportedly been active in their positions for a decade and more. In terms of the actual game, Nexus TK is most notable for its rather unusual partially player-run political / control element in which elected users run the justice system and make quite a few lower-level decisions that would typically be handled by GMs. What can't be questioned is the vital role the game played in popularizing the category in a country where its penetration rate is considerably higher than here. I've never seen either a hard number or a completely credible estimate, but a good guess would be somewhere in the low six-digit range. My primary reason for choosing Nexus TK is that it was Korea's closest parallel to UO in terms of taking the MMO market there from virtually nothing to a significant magnitude within a fairly short time. A North American version of the game entered commercial service in 1998, and is still running. Loosely combining influences from a popular series of graphic novels with elements derived from Korean history and mythology, the tile-based 2D offering was developed and published by a fledgling company that has since become a major global player we are all aware of, Nexon. However, a case an be made for Nexus TK, which launched in 1996, the year before. Like probably a large majority of industry observers, I tend to think of Ultima Online as the first MMOG of the modern era. ![]()
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