Mobizen: a Korean “Trojan horse” that’s helping mobile gamers share their skills

Anyone who’s paid even cursory attention to the global video gaming market over the past few years has noticed the industry’s most obvious trend: the rise of gaming videos and live streams. Gamers are watching even more than they’re playing these days, and gaming-focused video sites like Twitch have gone from niche to mainstream in a pretty short time. But while PC gamers can record videos with ease and next-gen PS4 and Xbox One consoles both include built-in features to facilitate video streaming and sharing, mobile gamers have been left in the cold. There are very few mobile gaming-focused video channels or live streams, at least in part because it’s difficult to record video on your phone.

Mobizen, a consumer-focused spin-off app from Korean remote enterprise solutions provider Rsupport, could change that. Mobizen is an Android app that makes it much easier for your mobile phone and your computer to play together, and it has a lot of useful features. But for gamers, there’s one in particular that stands out: it allows you to record HD videos of your screen to a PC or to your phone’s hard drive at the push of a button, without the need to root your phone.

Recently, I got the chance to catch up with Mobizen co-founder Matthew Choy to learn more about the app and how Mobizen thinks it can change the world of mobile gaming.

Finding an opening

Mobizen’s parent company, Rsupport, offers remote support solutions to other businesses. Before Mobizen, the company hadn’t ventured into the world of consumer apps. But Choy says that when looking at the Korean market, Rsupport saw an opportunity. “More kids are watching video games than playing video games,” Choy said. “We saw a lot of casual-to-hardcore gamers moving to a mobile platform. So we packaged some of the tools that we had developed for our remote support solutions into a mobile app.”

The result is that mobile gamers can upload videos of their gameplay to the web as easily as PC and console gamers can. And they can do it in surprisingly high quality. The app can record videos at 60 FPS, Choy tells me, meaning that in-game movement looks remarkably smooth. The app was released just four months ago, but Choy says it has already found an audience with Korea’s mobile gamers. The app already has “about 400,000 daily users” in the Korean market, and according to Choy about 80 percent of those users are using the app to record video games. “It’s a big deal in Korea right now,” he told me.

And although I can’t independently confirm those numbers, it’s clear that Mobizen is a popular way to record mobile gaming videos in Korea. When I used Korean search engine Naver to look for mobile gaming vids, I found a ton of them had been recorded using Mobizen.

Global ambitions

The company isn’t just focused on Korea, though. In fact, Rsupport sees Mobizen as a kind of “Trojan horse” – Choy’s words, not mine – it can use to penetrate overseas markets like the US, where the app now has 50,000 daily users. In fact, Choy tells me that there are currently no plans to monetize Mobizen, which is free. The company sees it as a kind of marketing tool. Rsupport has a big chunk of its business-to-business market in Asia, but the company is relatively unknown in the West. Mobizen is a consumer-facing app, but it’s also a kind of billboard that shows off the company’s technology to potential business clients. As the app’s popularity grows abroad, Western companies hear about it and approach Rsupport to ask if it licenses the technology on show in Mobizen. “Usually [when that happens] I pick up the phone and say, ‘Yeah, we have the exact product you’re looking for,'” Choy tells me. “It’s a tool to continue selling our other products,” he says.

Rsupport has offices in Tokyo and Beijing in addition to Seoul, and it has been pushing the app in Japan and China as well. In Japan, Mobizen has partnered with NTT Docomo to release a branded version of the app, and Choy says the company is partnering with some Chinese Android manufacturers to have the app come pre-installed. He wouldn’t say specifically which manufacturers the company is working woth, but he did say one of them recently became the third-largest handset manufacturer. Assuming he meant third-largest in the world, that means Mobizen is working with Xiaomi.

Wave of the future