Making Play

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Making Play
Pushing Buttons: Casey Lee at video-game company Com2uS USA’s headquarters in El Segundo.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a country in the world more obsessed with video games than South Korea.

Its nearly $3 billion online PC game market is second only to China’s, and nearly 40,000 spectators packed Seoul’s World Cup stadium in October to watch others compete in the world championships of “League of Legends,” a popular online multiplayer title published by Culver City’s Riot Games.

Now, as its home market nears saturation, one of South Korea’s oldest and largest developers of mobile game is hoping to grow revenue by bringing some of that rabid fandom to the United States and grabbing a bigger chunk of the growing $25 billion global market for mobile games.

Seoul’s Com2uS, founded in 1998, has planted its flag in Los Angeles and is using the city as an outpost to launch a sophisticated digital marketing campaign to introduce its tent-pole title to American consumers.

And the upside is high, as some local companies have figured out.

Beverly Hills’ SGN (Social Gaming Network) has a hit on its hands with Cookie Jam, a title that’s been downloaded more than 35 million times worldwide, according to the company.

The game is among the top 10 grossing apps in the United States on Google Play, as well as the top grossing puzzle game on the platform. It’s also one of the top grossing iPhone games in 20 countries. SGN adapted the game for the 20th Century Fox animated film “The Book of Life,” released in October.

“Our games can make more than a big movie,” said SGN Chief Executive Chris DeWolfe, a co-founder of Myspace Inc. “We’ll do over $200 million in revenue this year and we hope to triple the size of our company over the next year and a half.”

He added that 54 percent of SGN’s revenue currently comes from North American sales, though he predicted that percentage would decrease as it expands its international operations.

Like Com2uS titles, SGN games are free to download; the company makes money from selling in-game upgrades and enhancements.

Broadening horizons

Com2uS’ decision to take a more global approach came in late 2013, when Korean rival Gamevil Inc. acquired a majority stake in the company, said Casey Lee, the 26-year-old head of Com2uS USA Inc., who made the switch from Gamevil.

“The CEO brought with him that vision of global expansion,” Lee said, who works from the company’s El Segundo headquarters. “Com2uS was very well-established in Korea. We had no users in the West.”

Com2uS first landed in Menlo Park, but the company decided to move to Los Angeles to work in close proximity, next door in fact, to Gamevil’s Sepulveda Boulevard office. It now has 22 people in its local outpost, three-fourths of whom were hired locally.

After the acquisition, one of the company’s primary objectives became figuring out how to make its games appealing to North American audiences. It released its first two sports-themed titles, Golf Star and Ace Fishing, with little fanfare in order to test the market and figure out what U.S. consumers valued in their mobile-gaming experiences.

When it came time to release its newest title last June, fantasy fighting game Summoners War, Com2uS decided it was time to make a big splash.

But the company didn’t want to break the bank either.

“We needed to find a new form of traffic that wasn’t going to be as expensive,” Lee said.

So instead of spending millions on national TV commercials like Palo Alto’s Machine Zone did for its “Game of War” campaign featuring Kate Upton, or targeting only hardcore gamers, Com2uS decided to target young people who already spent much of their time on mobile phones but might not have considered themselves gamers.

The issue became, Lee said, how could the company target the audience of the future.

Millennial magic

He turned to Marina del Rey’s Cashmere Agency, a marketing firm that had handled accounts for music-editing app Vjay, as well as Snoop Dogg’s Snoopify, an app that lets you add virtual stickers to photos. The company also helped Tokyo messaging app Line Inc. launch its brand in the United States a few years ago.

Cashmere specializes in bringing mobile brands to multicultural millennials in big cities, said Ryan Ford, its executive vice president and chief creative officer. It has especially focused on Latino and African- and Asian-American communities, whose populations use mobile phones more than others.

“The majority of the people in those cities are people of color,” Ford said, so the goal was to include a wide variety of cultural influences in the campaign, starting with the influencers themselves.

Com2uS decided to reach out to more than a dozen social media celebrities on YouTube and video-sharing app Vine whose appeal stretches into many different communities. It hired them to promote the game through a series of YouTube videos and six-second Vine clips.

It also commissioned Australian street artist Meggs to paint a 2,000-square-foot mural inspired by Summoners War in downtown Los Angeles. A time-lapse video of his effort was then uploaded to YouTube. Another influencer created a series of clips documenting his trip to Seoul and Com2uS’ headquarters.

The game’s official commercial, symbolically titled “Breaking Barriers” and featuring three popular Vine creators, has been viewed more than 5 million times on YouTube. The company said its Vine videos have reached more than 30 million people. The game itself is also nearing 30 million downloads worldwide.

What’s more, the sale of virtual upgrades within the game to American players has had a profound impact on Com2uS’ bottom line, according to its 2014 earnings report released last week.

The company generated nearly $216 million in revenue last year, a 188 percent increase over the year before. It attributes much of that sales surge to the performance of Summoners War in the United States.

“It’s a big chunk,” said Lee, though he declined to offer a further breakdown.

However, all of those figures came before the U.S. marketing push started. While the game launched in June, the North American campaign only kicked off six weeks ago.

Needless to say, the company already has high hopes for next year’s numbers.

“We still want to do a lot more,” Lee said. “Let’s push the boundaries and go even further.”

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