The9’s Korea Head Tony Park Talks Firefall, the Garena Deal, and More

Shaking hands on the Reg 5-Garena deal

The9, a Chinese gaming company, recently established a South Korean branch. Not content with expanding just into Korea, The9 also recently inked a deal for The9-owned American developers Red 5 Studios to bring their game Firefall to Southeast Asia via Singapore-based Garena. Tony Park, the head of The9’s Korea branch, recently sat down to talk with Korean gaming site Thisisgame, and shed more light on the deal, the game, and gaming in China and Korea in general.

(A brief disclaimer: the original article is in Korean, which I can’t read, so I’m working from this Chinese translation on QQ Games. Given that I’m translating from a translation anyway, I won’t bother with direct quotes.)

First, Park was asked why bring Firefall to Taiwan and Southeast Asia before approaching bigger markets like China and Korea. He responded that the market strategy for those larger countries wasn’t yet in place, but that they wanted to get things rolling in the right direction as quickly as possible; hence the early expansion into smaller Asian markets.

Those markets aren’t necessarily going to be easy, though. Park conceded that they’d face challenges from Korean first-person shooter games in the Southeast Asian market, but pointed out that Firefall — as an open world, massively-multiplayer PvE-based FPS — is pretty distinct from much of the competition, which tends to be low player-count PvP games in small maps rather than an open world (although Firefall does have PvP elements as well as PvE). He says this is something they discussed with Garena during the negotiations, and ultimately Garena was convinced of the game’s ability to compete or they wouldn’t have signed the deal.

So that explains why Garena went for Firefall, but why did Red 5 and The9 go for Garena? Park says they were impressed by Garena’s performance as the operator of League of Legends in many Asian countries, where it was offering reliable service despite extremely high player counts. Players in Southeast Asia trust them, and their service has worked for similar free-to-play titles like League of Legends, so Garena was a natural choice.

I'm Tony Park, suckaaaaa! (not a direct quote)

Of course, there’s also the question of the deal, which at $10 million just for southeast Asia broke a record that had been previously set by multiplayer gaming giant Blizzard. Park says the number got so high simply because people — Garena reps and gamers in general — were excited about the game. After Red 5 showed it and let people play it publicly at a number of gaming conventions internationally (G-star, Chinajoy, PAX, etc.), Garena was convinced the game was, as they say, the real deal.

Despite the Asian-connections, Firefall is an American game that’s being developed primarily by the Red 5 Studios team in the US. How will that affect its reception in Southeast Asia and elsewhere? Park notes that very few American and European online games find major success in Asia. But, the Firefall team is made up of a lot of people who worked on World of Warcraft, one of the few Western online games that is an undeniable smash hit in Asia. And, of course, Red 5 has studio branches in Asia and is now owned by The9, so they’re being led by people who know Asia well.

On a broader note, Park was asked about the differences between the market in China and Korea, since he’s in a particularly unique position to deal with them both on a regular basis. He said there was lots of imagination in the constantly-changing Chinese market, but that he also felt there wasn’t a lot of creative challenge happening at the development level.

In case you’re wondering what the heck everyone is talking about, here’s the Firefall trailer from G-star. Think this has the potential to conquer Southeast Asia?

[Via QQ Games]