Observation | South Korea’s Gaming Market: The Expansive Comic Market of South Korean and The Active Webtoon Adaptation(Ⅰ)

In recent years, there is a clear tendency that more and more Korean webtoon IP has been gamified and game IP has been adapted into webtoon. 

As early as 2019-2020, the IP of Netmarble’s game Seven Knights was adapted to Seven Knights Arkaid and Seven Knights Dark Servant and released on kakao page; Being Targeted by Bad Boys, a story game issued by Com2uS’s subsidiary Day Seven, was also adapted to webtoon and net play in 2019. In the midst of the long-term epidemic, the global market of webtoon has become active, and South Korean game companies have been actively seeking cooperation with webtoon.

Since the end of 2020, more and more cases show that in the Korean market, the mutual adaptation between webtoon and game is becoming the norm.

On the one hand, South Korean game companies are developing mobile games originated from webtoons. At the same time, with the further development of the popular game IP being adapted to webtoon, some “established” IP is now making a return.

Joy City

Self-built Subsidiaries to Promote the Development of the Pan-entertainment of Game IP.

On December 21 last year, Roadbe Webtoon, a subsidiary of Joy City, a South Korean game company, announced that it would officially launch its web-based business. Joy City expects to adapt its major net plays, such as Freestyle, A Simple Competition, Dice God and Rule the Sky, to webtoons via Roadbe Webtoon. It also plans to launch a new work, Project M, in the second half of this year, which will be released as both a game and a webtoon, and is expected to be a representative cross-marketing case.

Roadbe webtoon is running a webtoon studio, a project to support star writers and new writers, and a project to train webtoon writers. At the same time, Roadbe Webtool is also developing derivative products by using IP with an extensible world view. To this end, it has set up a “story planning team” and a production team specialized in quarterly production to promote long stories.

Park Chung-ji, a representative of Roadbe Webtool, said that the online market was recovering as public demand for “ontact” (online plus non-face-to-face) grew, and they would find and develop stars and new writers, and improve their competitiveness through mature IP and home-made webtoons.

Joy City’s shares were trading at 30,400 KRW as of 10 a.m., up 6.11 percent from the previous session. KB Securities analyst Ren Shangguo believes that through the establishment of subsidiaries, Joy City’s new network business will draw attention from the public, and the adaptation of games to webtoons is expected to strengthen IP awareness, profitability and joint marketing synergies.