Photo card side effects ‘criticism of determination’… What is the difference from probability items?
Min Hee-jin, CEO of Adore, press conference
(Seoul = Larose.VIP) Reporter Kim Joo-hwan = “Instead of randomly selling photo cards, let’s compete with content and see how much we sell…”
The contents of the emergency press conference held by Min Hee-jin, CEO of Adore, the agency of the popular group New Jeans, held on the 25th of last month are still a hot topic.
The main content is the parent company Hive[352820]This was to refute the suspicion raised by CEO Min of an attempt to seize management rights from Adore.
However, the ‘shadows’ that CEO Min criticized in the process, such as the entertainment industry’s practice of bundling photo cards, pushing out albums, and copying idol concepts, resonated with many K-pop consumers.
While watching the press conference that lasted about two hours, I suddenly saw the domestic gaming industry losing trust from consumers due to excessive marketing.
Focus your fingers too
Photo cards, which CEO Min strongly criticized, are currently a key product driving album sales in the K-pop industry.
A photo card is a business card-sized card containing a photo of an idol group member. When purchasing a physical album, one or two copies are randomly included, stimulating fans’ desire to collect.
There are often different photo cards for each type of album, or limited edition cards that can only be obtained from albums sold by a specific distributor.
It is a business model that may feel somewhat familiar to anyone who has played competitive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) or character collection games.
The problem is that as photo card marketing heats up, it is not uncommon for people trying to obtain them to purchase tens to hundreds of copies of the same album, only taking the photo cards, and then throwing away the rest.
Recently, a photo of the group Seventeen’s albums being thrown away in a pile on the streets of Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan was posted on social media, causing shock.
Seventeen albums abandoned in a pile on the streets of Tokyo, Japan
Points that photo card marketing disrupts music charts and produces unrecyclable waste have been around for a long time, even before CEO Min’s press conference. However, the entertainment industry, which needs a solid cash cow, did not give up.
The same goes for the gaming industry. Seeing the potential of ‘whale’ users who spend tens to hundreds of millions of won every month on random items with a chance of winning at the level of a pinhole, rather than trying to innovate, they focused on developing a BM (profit model) that would squeeze out users.
Similar pay-to-win (the more money you spend, the stronger you get) games, called the so-called Lineage-like (a pejorative term), have begun to dominate the domestic gaming industry. Gamers who were watching this turned their backs on the Korean game market.
This point is also in line with the copying of the concept of a popular idol pointed out by CEO Min.
Some game companies did not hesitate to manipulate item probabilities. The result was a series of protests by gamers and the passage of a bill to regulate random items.
Early this year, the Fair Trade Commission even took action and imposed a fine of more than 10 billion won on game companies that were found to have manipulated odds, and carried out on-site investigations targeting companies that had filed complaints.
Coincidentally, the Fair Trade Commission also began an on-site investigation last year into allegations of ‘tying and selling’ photo cards of major entertainment agencies.
Prevent scam games and probability manipulation… Revision of standard terms and conditions (CG)
Game companies have Internet broadcasters broadcast so-called ‘promotions’, that is, paying advertising fees and spending large sums of money on probability items. Viewers are stimulated by this and compete to purchase probability items with the thought, ‘Maybe I can do that too’.
Some game companies have even institutionalized a system in which a portion of the amount paid by gamers is sponsored by Internet broadcasters.
This is similar to the ‘push’ that CEO Min pointed out, that is, the practice of handing album sales to record distributors to increase sales and the distributors holding unreasonable fan signing events to use up the album sales.
Meanwhile, Chinese games have encroached on the Korean market with significantly higher quality and aggressive marketing.
According to a report published by the app market analysis service ‘Mobile Index GAME’ at the end of last month, the proportion of Chinese games in the top 20 grossing games in the domestic app market exceeded 30%.
Chinese mobile games dominate daily sales rankings in the domestic app market
The multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) ‘Lineage M’, which had been holding the top spot in sales, also lost its crown to the Chinese idle game ‘Growing Mushrooms’ and the strategy simulation game ‘Last War’.
Fortunately, the gaming industry is also belatedly releasing games that focus on fun and new experiences, which are the essence of games.
In the process, highly regarded games such as ‘Dave the Diver’, ‘The Lies of P’, and ‘Stella Blade’ were released.
However, there is still a long way to go to regain gamers’ trust in the gaming industry as a whole.
The game industry, which is facing a decline in consumer trust, listened to CEO Min’s words, “The introduction of water-soluble paper is what kind of ESG (environmental, social, and governance improvement) management? We should have made fewer albums, why are you making such puns?” This is why you need to listen intently.
CEO Min Hee-jin, press conference
jujuk@yna.co.kr
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