Forbes_USA_June_13_2017

STRATEGIES
How the West
Was Won
Despite making a series of smash-hit games for
its home Asian market, NCSoft has struggled to
translate to America—until its billionaire founder
put his MIT-educated wife at the controls.
BY DAVID M. EWALT
NCSoft West CEO Yoon
Songyee wrote her
Ph.D. thesis on a new
method for designing
virtual creatures with
realistic personalities and
emotions.
In 1998, a startup called NCSoft launched one
of the most popular videogames of all time,
although you’ve probably never heard of it.
The game has earned more than $2.6 billion
in revenue, including $330 million in 2016,
18 years after it hit the market. But you probably
don’t know anyone who has played it.
Two decades after it was founded, South Korea-based
NCSoft is one of the biggest game companies
on the planet, with a long list of hits and
successful franchises, yet it remains largely unknown
across the Pacific. Games like its flagship
title, Lineage, were blockbusters in Asia but
failed to catch on with Western players. Repeated
attempts to expand the business into the United
States never gained traction.
But Kim Taek-Jin, the company’s billionaire
CEO, is determined to change that. In the past two
years, NCSoft has built a new game studio in California,
pivoted toward a risky mobile strategy and
begun developing new properties for Western audi
ences. Kim is so committed to translating NC-
Soft’s success that he has even bet his family on the
project: His wife, Yoon Songyee, an accomplished
executive and neuroscientist known as Genius Girl
in Korea, moved to California in 2014 with their
kids to run the company’s U.S. subsidiary.
“We’ve been keeping our eye on the Western
market for a long time, and it’s important to us,”
says Yoon, the CEO of NCSoft West. “We have
a big presence in Asia and Korea, but that’s not
enough. We want a global audience.”
Kim founded NCSoft in March 1997, when he
was a 30-year-old engineer who had worked for
Hyundai Electronics in R&D and in the division
that operated Korea’s first internet provider. NC-
Soft was initially positioned as a systems-integration
company, but Kim and several key employees
were enthusiastic gamers and quickly realized their
networking know-how could be used to power
videogames with thousands of simultaneous users.
In September 1998, NCSoft launched Lineage, one
of Korea’s first massively multiplayer online roleplaying
games, or MMORPGs, in which players
fight and explore their way through a medieval
fantasy setting. The game was a hit: Three years
later, it had more than 3 million subscribers paying
about $25 a month.
Kim quickly tried to repeat that success in
America. In May 2000, the company launched
NCSoft Interactive, a subsidiary in Austin, Texas,
and just over a year later released an English-language
version of Lineage in North America. But
Western gamers were much less enthusiastic than
their Korean counterparts. The game was built for
Asian consumers who often played with groups of
friends, in internet cafes, on relatively underpowered
computers. Americans played solo, at home,
on newer PCs, so the game seemed difficult, repetitive
and dated.
Lineage struggled in the U.S., but NCSoft didn’t
give up. In 2001, the company acquired Destination
Games, also in Austin, but the studio took six years
to release its first title, the MMORPG Tabula Rasa,
which sold so poorly that NCSoft shut it down after
just 15 months. In 2002, NCSoft acquired Seattle developer
ArenaNet, and that deal went better: Arena-
Net’s 2005 Guild Wars remains one of NCSoft’s few
hits in North America. Yet back in Korea, NCSoft
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