Scaleform Sees Korea Sales Surge 70 Percent

UI middleware provider Scaleform says revenue from licensees in Korea has grown 70 percent year-over-year, pointing to rapid adoption from the region's major companies including NCsoft and Nexon. This makes Korea, also home to licensees Webzen, Gamehi and Neowiz, among others, Scaleform's second-largest market. Browser-based MMOs and free-to-play games are widely played and developed in Korea, and Scaleform says the Flash base of its GFx middleware helps explain the rapid uptick. It also credits its Input Method Editor, which it built with the aim of making interfaces in multiple languages simpler to build. "The largely PC-based online game environment of Korea has proven to be the ideal market for Scaleform," the company says. The IME, as Scaleform refers to it, also allows developers to implement in-game chat that supports languages from all over the world, creating a potential larger userbase. Further, Scaleform says its middleware offers developers a favorable ratio of UI performance to system resources because it relies on Flash to generate rich interfaces at lower bandwidth costs. "This is critical to the performance of massively multiplayer online games, which are the most popular game genre in Korea," says the company's Korea manager Dillion Seo. The company says it'll increase its focus on serving the needs of the Korean MMO market: Scaleform president and CEO Brendan Iribe explains: "We have made several key hires and adjusted our product roadmap to ensure we support this market to the best of our abilities and continue to rapidly grow in Korea."