Amidst Smilegate RPG’s bid to take the company public, formalizing its initial public offering (IPO) has faced delays due to a slower than expected expansion overseas (which is key to attracting investment capital and increasing the demand for shares in open market trading). One of South Korea’s largest capital management firms, Mirae Asset Daewoo was selected by Smilegate RPG as an underwriter.
This disclosure (from an article on a Korean financial site; The Bell) revealed that Smilegate RPG has been facing challenges with launching Lost Ark in more regions outside of South Korea (Russia/CIS is the only other region in operation since Smilegate RPG is busy with getting Japan up next). One of the main reasons is due to localization (which they seem to be handling internally as opposed to subcontracting or allowing the publisher to perform some of that work). It took them an year to perform this work for the Russian client. Since Japanese is grammatically closer to Korean, that work should be completed much faster.
I’ve noted before that properly localization all of the main line quest/story is going to take awhile due to the sheer number of them (some of the other info in that post is outdated like my mentioning of China being up next; this was before the severity of the moratorium on approvals was known) and since it does look like Smilegate RPG wants to handle the localization (as opposed to the publisher), EU is most definitely going to take much longer since that region tends to cover several countries with their own respective languages (English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese being the primary ones). This localization includes both the text and vocal dialogue. Many people are under the assumption that localization is simply a quick word for word translation but that is far from the truth since structurally and grammatically, Asian languages like Korean, Chinese, and Japanese, are different from western languages. Written Kanji (as is the case with Chinese and Japanese) is loaded with context for example.
Due to the successful launch last November of Lost Ark, Smilegate RPG decided to launch an IPO in order to gain access to the capital markets to further fund the expansion of Lost Ark. In the years prior to 2015, venture capital was far more accessible for PC MMORPG development (but from 2015 and later, most of this investment capital/private equity was going into mobile gaming, making it far more difficult to self fund or raise private investment money since the ROI from PC MMORPG’s continued declining compared to mobile).
Mirae Asset Daewoo’s plan to maximize the value of this IPO has three specific stages to it: having a steady domestic market (which includes continuous content updates), entry into the overseas market (which again, only Russia/CIS is in live operation with Japan up next), and launching a mobile version of Lost Ark. By executing all three of these phases, the projected value of the Smilegate RPG IPO is expected to be around 5 trillion won ($4.3 billion US). Obviously, not executing all of these phases will result in their being less demand for the IPO (and will result in them raising far less money) which could also impact the public perception on the open market.
The end of the article notes that Smilegate RPG reportedly has no plans for overseas expansion outside of Russia and Japan, and that once Japan officially launches, it will then take them time to launch a mobile version. A former company official was also quoted as stating they only selected an issuer (Mirae Asset Daewoo) as part of the initial due diligence, but that it didn’t mean it was going to quickly progress to a formalized IPO (and thus actual listing on the exchange).
