This Week In Korean Online Gaming News: From NATE To Nexon

[Gamasutra rounds up the week's biggest reports on South Korea's booming online games market from This Is Game, the leading English-language site about the country's game industry.] In our latest round-up of news from South Korea's online games space, we look at MapleStory: Adventures' release on Facebook, 35 million users' info leaked after Cyworld and NATE were hacked, and new concurrent user records for MapleStory and Dungeon & Fighter. MapleStory: Adventures Launched On Facebook Earlier this week, Nexon launched its open beta for MapleStory: Adventures, a social game adaptation of its free-to-play side-scrolling MMORPG, on Facebook. The client-based version of MapleStory, which debuted in 2003, has more than 100 million registered users around the world. This Facebook edition of MapleStory features many of the same action RPG elements of the original, but also adds social touches like allowing players to invite their friends to quests, then having those friends' avatars help attack enemies. Gamers can also send MapleStory gifts to each other. "MapleStory Adventures represents one of Nexon’s top priorities of bringing our most popular games to the biggest audiences," says Nexon America CEO Kim. "The game brings a whole new action RPG element to the Facebook space, a genre that hasn’t been widely explored on the social gaming platform." Cyworld/NATE Hacked, Personal Details For 35 Million Users Leaked In one of the biggest hacking incidents to hit South Korea, SK Telecom revealed that hackers broke into its popular web portal NATE and social network/virtual world Cyworld, and were able to access personal information for some 35 million users -- around two-thirds of the country's total population. The personal information those hackers potentially retrieved includes customer names, IDs, passwords, phone numbers, addresses, resident registration numbers (Korea's equivalent to social security numbers), and more. SK says the passwords and resident registration numbers were encrypted. Local online gaming sites like NCsot's PlayNC, CJ Corporation's Netmarble, and Neowiz Games' Pmang have already begun notifying their customers about the security breach, and are advising them to change their passwords, especially if they are identical to their NATE/Cyworld passwords. Nexon's Dungeon & Fighter, MapleStory Break Concurrency Records Nexon announced that two of its free-to-play MMORPGs, Dungeon & Fighter (known as Dungeon Fighter Online in North America and Arad Senki in Japan) and MapleStory, broke their concurrent user records in Korea, or the number of users playing a game simultaneously. MapleStory bested its previous high of 417,000 concurrent users and hit 588,067 concurrent users last Saturday, which Nexon credited to recent updates released for the free-to-play title. The company claims this is the highest concurrent user count for any game in Korea ever. Dungeon & Fighter recently hit 290,000 concurrent users in the country after the release of a "D&F Revolution" update with significant content additions. The online game is even more popular in China, where its concurrent user record is up to 2.6 million players. [This story was written with the permission of, and using material from ThisIsGame Global, the leading English-language site about the South Korean game industry.]