Stellar Blade director and Shift Up CEO Hyung-Tae Kim says the team behind the game risked “abandon[ing] the local market” in South Korea when they chose to develop a console game over a mobile title.
Speaking via a translator to Kotaku Australia, Kim said the Korean gaming market is heavily “mobile-centric, without [many] console games,” and the choice to make Stellar Blade a console title came with its own challenges and risks. “To make a console game pretty much means to abandon the local market,” he says, “so doing this itself was already a big challenge.”
Just last year, analytics site Sensor Tower reported that the South Korean mobile gaming market revenue for in-app purchases was expected to reach almost $3.6 billion by the end of the third quarter, with 60% of mobile game sales in the country attributed to RPGs alone. These sales figures continue to grow, with Venturebeat reporting in 2019 that 53% of South Koreans played mobile games at least once a month, in comparison to console (19%) and PC games (37%).
Kim says the state of the local market made developing Stellar Blade particularly difficult, because “there weren’t that many developers experienced” in console development either. “We all had to study on our own and grow during the process, and process itself was another difficult thing,” he says.
Despite the difficulties, Kim says the goal of Stellar Blade was to create a title that would stack up against the global AAA competition. “Despite [these challenges], we wanted to make a game that can be put together with other very globally successful world class titles and still be chosen among those games,” Kim says.
The Stellar Blade developer’s goal of drawing global attention as opposed to focusing on home soil seems to have paid off – according to Nintendolife, the title has already topped UK sales charts. Sales numbers for other corners of the world are yet to be released, but if the user and critic review scores and online discourse are anything to go by, it seems likely that Shift Up’s newest title has experienced success globally, despite the difficulty of getting a console title off the ground in a heavily mobile-focused market.
Have you played Stellar Blade yet? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Image: Shift Up
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