How to localize your game for the Korean market: interesting stats and 5 essential tips

2024-08-30 | ANASTASIIA OSYPENKO

Korea is one of the largest gaming markets in Asia and the whole world. Not only does it offer a huge and vibrant community of players, but its audience is also very willing to spend money on games. 

In this post, we’ll cover the major aspects of the game industry in Korea—and why you should consider localizing your game to Korean—and give you some proven tips on what to be aware of with Korean translation. 

Table of contents

4 reasons to consider publishing your games in Korean

Peculiarities of the game market in South Korea

1. Social gaming and PC bangs
2. Regulations for games on the Korean market
3. Publishing and promoting on Kakao

How to localize your game to Korean: 5 tips

1. Pay attention to degrees of formality
2. Mind the font
3. Don’t break sentences for translation
4. Ensure correct formatting
5. Get creative with local marketing

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Korea is the fourth global gaming market by revenue ($7.4 billion in 2022) and has one of the most engaged player audiences in the world.
• Koreans enjoy social gaming. Internet cafes are hugely popular in the country, and there’s a large share of participants and viewers of eSports events.
• The ecosystem of Kakao products (a messaging app and game publishing platforms) is very important in the process of localizing the game and promoting it in Korea.
• It’s essential to choose fonts that support the full Korean alphabet and consider the different levels of formality that exist in the Korean language.

4 reasons to consider publishing your games in Korean

The Korean game market is one of the largest in the world—fourth by revenue to be precise ($7.4 billion in 2022). 

According to Newzoo, European countries that are next on the list have a higher number of players but lower revenue (for instance, Germany with almost 50 million gamers amounted to $6.5 billion, while 33 million Korean gamers accounted for $7.4 billion). It means that there are not only many game enthusiasts in Korea but they also have a high capacity to pay for entertainment. 

Let’s take a look at some other facts and numbers about the South Korean game market:

1. Korean users increase their spending on games from year to year. According to the Newzoo report, 52% of South Korean users spend money on games. And as per the data.ai 2023 report, the average monthly spend on Korean game apps was $7.29 on the App Store and $11.38 on Google Play (the latter is the biggest number of individual monthly spending in the world). In the sector of PC games, the average spend on in-game purchases stood at $25 per month in 2023, while players in their 30s spent around $31. These numbers are actually higher than in the US, where the average video game spending in 2023 was estimated at $19 per month. 
2. All genders and age groups are almost equally involved in playing games. What might be shocking to other countries is that 51-61-year-olds in Korea account for 23% of players.

3. South Korea has a flourishing game live streaming market. According to Statista, its revenue is estimated at $430 million in 2024, and the number of users engaged in game live streaming is expected to reach 22.5 million by 2027. Korea represents one of the most active Asian game live streaming audiences that shows increased engagement year to year.

4. There’s a strong local scene of pro players. Korea is the third country in the world by the size of the eSports market. There’s an abundance of leagues and teams, and a lot of South Koreans are able to live off tournament earnings and pro gamer salaries. The country also makes for the biggest share of tournament followers (for instance, Koreans accounted for 31% of the audience of the League of Legends World Championships).

Peculiarities of the game market in South Korea

There are a couple of things that characterize the Korean online game market: 

• Local players enjoy social gaming the most (not least due to the tradition of internet cafes called PC bangs)
• The country is rather liberal when it comes to game content restrictions or censorship but it does have its regulatory process
• A local messaging app called KakaoTalk is an essential component of game marketing and the Kakao Games platform is worth considering for publication

Let’s see what you need to know about these aspects before launching a game on the South Korean market. 

1. Social gaming and PC bangs

So-called PC bangs are internet cafes where you can engage in multiplayer computer games. People pay an hourly fee and play different games where they can cooperate with each other within a team. PC bangs started appearing around 1998, and now play an important social role for South Koreans who go there to spend time with friends or colleagues. The sales revenue of PC bangs reached over $1.3 billion in 2022. 

How can you use this data to your advantage? If your game is cooperative by nature, then you have a high chance of appealing to the local Korean audience. But if it’s not meant to be played in a team, consider implementing some other forms of socialization within the game or around it (competition with friends, chatting, etc.).

2. Regulations for games on the Korean market

South Korea has a dedicated regulatory body responsible for reviewing games, the Game Rating and Administration Committee (GRAC), formerly the Game Rating Board. Games are obliged to receive a rating from GRAC before being promoted and sold in the country. 

The rating system takes into account different areas of sensitive content, such as depiction of violence, explicit language, or anti-governmental messages. For the most part, it’s similar to the ESRB rating system that exists in Northern America.

Very few games get banned in Korea, but it still might be the case. For instance, Mortal Kombat was rejected because of cruelty, and Homefront was prohibited because its plot negatively portrayed an alternative, unified Korea.

Compared to another Asian game market giant, China, which has tons of regulations (to publish a game in China, you might need to reconsider or amend certain things), South Korea is very liberal. In 2021, the country even lifted the restrictions that prevented children below 16 from playing after midnight and before 6 AM.

One thing that Korea remains strict about is gambling and play-to-earn gaming. Gambling games are generally illegal apart from certain exceptions, and the depiction of gambling in video games is one of the deciding factors in the age rating system. Plus, play-to-earn, blockchain-based NFT games are banned since 2021. 

3. Publishing and promoting on Kakao

South Korea has a super-popular social network app called KakaoTalk that has expanded beyond messaging and features a whole ecosystem of products, including the game publishing and distribution service Kakao Games.

There are over 50 million KakaoTalk users, and 47+ million of them are from South Korea, which is more than 90% of the country’s population. You don’t want to miss out on an opportunity to reach all these users: consider publishing on Kakao platforms (available for PC and mobile games) and learn about the proven tactics of KakaoTalk marketing.

For instance, when Candy Crush Saga was launched on Kakao, the developer cooperated with the platform to create special social features in the app like exclusive emojis or game requests to friends. 

Note that the publication process on Kakao Games might take some time. The company will test your game to ensure that it provides value to Korean players. To get accepted, you’ll need to have impeccable Korean game localization. 

How to localize your game to Korean: 5 tips

1. Pay attention to degrees of formality

Historically, there have been 7 different speech levels in Korean, each representing a different level of formality. While not all of them are in use today, it’s still important to know how to distinguish the major ones and how to apply them to your game translation to Korean:

• 하십시오체 (hasipsioche) is the most respectful level used in very formal environments
• 해라체 (haerache) is used in books and other written forms
• 해요체 (haeyoche) is an informal level that is most commonly used in speech
• 해체 (haeche) is only used between friends

Each degree of formality also involves a different intonation pattern. If you’re going to record Korean dubbing, make sure that voice actors understand these nuances. 

On top of that, there are various honorifics in the Korean language that your translators need to be aware of. In certain contexts, you’ll need to use a completely different word because of the honorific form.

2. Mind the font

Apart from Korean characters looking very different from the Latin alphabet—and you’ll need to find fonts that support Korean—there are two types of encoding that are used for the Korean language. In Wansung (완성형), each Hangul syllable is stored as a single character in the encoding system, while in Johab (조합형), syllables are constructed dynamically. 

Since the Wansung font is limited to a predefined set of syllables, it’s more prone to errors. For example, a user complaining about the Apex Legends game localization into Korean noted that Wansung can’t show misspelled words (in the in-game chat)—you’ll see broken symbols instead. 

NB! As a rule of thumb, you should allow for text expansion, as characters and sentences in other languages tend to get way longer compared to English. However, the situation might be the opposite—the Korean text might take less space:

3. Don’t break sentences for translation

Korean has a very different word order compared to English. The usual pattern is subject-object verb. For example, “I eat apples” in Korean, if translated literally, would follow the structure “I  apples eat.”

For this reason, it’s essential not to divide any phrases or sentences when preparing your game for translation to Korean. Make sure that the localization tool you’re using doesn’t break long sentences and always gives context for translators. 

4. Ensure correct formatting

Different countries tend to have different rules when it comes to formatting numbers, dates, and units of measurement. Here’s what you need to have correct formatting in your game in Korean:

• Prices should be listed in Korean won (₩) without the acronym KRW.
• Decimal points are usually avoided, and prices are shown as whole numbers​.
• Large numbers are grouped in units of ten thousand (만, literally means “one ten thousand”).
• Dates are formatted as “year-month-day” (e.g., 2024-07-11).
• Koreans have their own units of measurement but they’ve switched to the metric system. The old units such as pyeong (평) can be used in the historical context

5. Get creative with local marketing

While localizing game content is essential, you shouldn’t diminish the role of localizing marketing strategies and materials. Here are some of the things you can consider:

• Create a channel on KakaoTalk. We’ve already mentioned that KakaoTalk and other Kakao products are clear trendsetters in the country that influence the dynamics of gaming and impact the distribution of top games in Korea. Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans are just a few examples of foreign games earning massive success in Korea thanks to KakaoTalk.
• Cooperate with local influencers and eSports figures to promote the game. 
• Consider physical advertising. It’s always a good idea to create localized posters and other promotional materials to engage local audiences. There’s no limit to what you can think of: for example, Clash of Clans installed their characters in a mall within the Korean marketing campaign. 
• Opt for Korean dubbing. This might significantly depend on the genre and target audience so do some user interviews to find out if dubbing is worth it. For instance, in a survey by Musai Studio, only 103 respondents claimed to prefer Korean-dubbed voices, while 336 responders expressed a neutral position. Still, it might be a great attraction factor if it fits your game.

Start your journey to entering the Korean game market

We hope the tips we’ve shared will help you shape your opinion about the Korean game market and build a strategy for high-quality localization. The Korean community of gamers is very active and also critical. Korean players will get angry if the translation quality is not good or if the game localization is delayed (what happened to Witcher 3, for example).

To succeed with your game in Korean, cooperate with native translators who understand the nuances of the language and implement local tools like KakaoTalk to promote your product.

If you want to enter different Asian gaming markets—which is often the right thing to do—we recommend starting Japanese and Chinese localization simultaneously. Drop us a line to learn more details about the translation process and cost estimates.