[DigitalToday reporter Lee Ho-jung] The idle, or “raise,” genre is resurging in the mobile game market. It is the result of three factors overlapping: limits of a revenue structure centred on massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), changes in the core group of paying users, and lower development costs. Some in the industry also say it remains to be seen whether the trend will last, as it has already been shown that intellectual property (IP) alone cannot guarantee a hit and that genre design capabilities will determine staying power.

On March 3, industry sources said Nexon’s “Maple Raising” reclaimed the No. 1 spot in Google Play Store revenue rankings as of last month. The game succeeded after its launch in November last year, recording cumulative revenue of 150 billion won in 45 days. It later faced errors in applying stats and probability-based items and took the drastic step of offering full refunds worth 130 billion won. Daily active users (DAU) plunged and the game even ceded the top revenue position to a Chinese casual strategy game, but it rebounded quickly. A key reason users stayed despite the major setback is seen as loyalty to the MapleStory IP built up over more than 20 years of service.

◆Why idle games now

South Korean game companies are turning to idle games amid structural changes in the MMORPG market. Competition in the global MMORPG market has intensified, and rising labour and technology costs have increased the risk of development strategies focused on blockbuster titles. Idle games, by contrast, have a structure that can generate stable revenue with relatively short development periods and low operating costs.

The domestic industry’s full-scale move into idle games began with the performance of Netmarble’s “Seven Knights Raising” in 2023. The title contributed to a recovery in Netmarble’s then-sluggish results and showed that operational know-how and IP assets built through MMORPG services could be converted at low cost.

On top of that, the rise of users in their 30s and 40s as the de facto core paying group has aligned with a strategy of using classic IP. One store statistics show people in their 40s have the highest spending per person among all age groups, while those in their 30s rank first in both number of buyers and share of payments. Korea Creative Content Agency data also show the share of people spending more than 100,000 won a year on PC games is 34.9 percent for those in their 30s and 38.6 percent for those in their 40s, far above teens at 18.1 percent and those in their 20s at 24 percent. With the domestic game usage rate having fallen to 50.2 percent last year, it is a natural step for game companies to focus on them.

Classic IP is directly tied to this strategy. For the 30s and 40s generation that played games in the 1990s and 2000s, familiar IP lowers the barrier to initial entry, and idle games’ simple controls improve accessibility for users with less free time. Netmarble has announced the launch of “Stone Age Raising” on March 3. It reinterprets the original IP, which has secured a cumulative 200 million users worldwide since its 1999 release, as an idle RPG, targeting longtime fans by implementing pet capture and riding systems and nostalgic monsters. New Normal Soft also began pre-registration on Feb. 23 for “The War of Genesis Raising,” which uses the IP of The War of Genesis, a leading South Korean RPG series from the 1990s.

◆IP is the entry, structure decides success

But it has already been shown that classic IP does not guarantee success. NCSoft released the idle RPG “Journey of Monarch” using the Lineage IP, but it fell short of expectations because it did not solve the task of simplifying the existing MMORPG-style growth structure to fit idle-game conventions. Com2uS’ “Summoners War: Rush” also tried to differentiate itself by adding tower defence elements, but it did not lead to long-term success amid assessments that the fun factors of the two genres were not sufficiently combined. Instead, during this period, global idle games increased their presence by taking spots near the top of domestic revenue rankings.

A common point in those cases is that they relied on IP recognition but did not meet the conventions of the genre itself. Idle-game users react sensitively to growth pace, reward systems and monetisation structures. Transplanting high-cost MMORPG-style design as-is quickly raises user fatigue, which is a structural characteristic of the genre.

Maple Raising’s rebound was largely possible because it had the MapleStory IP accumulated over more than 20 years. Since Stone Age and The War of Genesis have different depths of IP assets, an analysis suggests the success of later titles is likely to depend less on IP recognition than on how precisely they design growth structures suited to the idle genre.

An industry official said, “For idle RPGs, the key is designing how precisely users feel they are growing, as much as lowering system complexity.” The official added, “IP can make people press the download button, but what makes them turn it on the next day is ultimately the game’s structure.”