Main local game enterprises are seeking potential growth opportunity in a future technology such as drone, cloud out of games.

According to the industry experts on March 8, local game companies such as NCsoft, NHN Entertainment, and HanbitSoft are actively expanding their new business such as drone (unmanned aerial vehicle) and cloud.

NCsoft and HanbitSoft are investing in ‘Drone’. Both companies are making investment under the assumption that drone technology effect in all fields will be bigger than ever in the future.

According to market researcher company- Gartner, worldwide shipments of drones are expected to increase by 39% to 3 million units, and the market to grow by 34.3% to USD 6 billion (about KRW 6.9 trillion). The government has recently announced plans to increase the size of the domestic drone market, which was KRW 70 billion last year, to KRW 2.5 trillion by 2026, through investing KRW 1.4 trillion in research and development and infrastructure for 10 years.

NCsoft has invested KRW 1.5 billion and KRW 4.8 billion in Byrobot and Uvify drones in 2014 and 2016, respectively. ByRobot is a toy drone manufacturer. Uvify is a technology startup that develops artificial intelligence (AI) based self flight drone. NCsoft is seeking further investment in related businesses.

A representative of NCsoft official said, ‘We will invest in a company that possesses technologies that are expected to have a significant impact on the market in the future. Also, we will invest in technology holders and access the market in the long term.’


HanbitSoft has changed the mission of RedTee Studio, which was taken over in 2008, to ‘Hanbit Drones’ in 2015, and supplies drones for hobby through this subsidiary. The company is expanding investment in industrial drones. The company will be in the agriculture and forestry drones market in cooperation with the unmanned helicopter farming specialist company-MS-Aviation. MS- aviation is particularly recognized in the field of Avian Influenza (AI). The company has signed an exclusive supply contract with PrecisionHwak-American industrial drone manufacture, data analysis system developing company in October, last year.

The director of HanbitSoft-Kim Yoo Ra said, ‘The reason why we need to pay attention to agricultural drone is not only the simple control of crops but also the demand to cope with grasping the status of crops in real time by looking at the entire farmland. Drones will be able to identify and monitor solar energy facilities quickly so that the use of the drone will increase in the future.’

NHN Entertainment is active in the cloud business. According to the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning, domestic cloud market size has been increased by 55.2% to KRW 1.21 trillion last year.

NHN Entertainment recently signed an agreement to expand sales network of Samyang Data System and its integrated cloud solution ``Toast Cloud``. Samyang Data resells the infrastructure product (IaaS) provided by NHN Entertainment’s toast cloud to its customers and external companies.

Besides, the company has entered into a ``Public Sector Cloud Store Basic Agreement`` with the Korea IT Promotion Agency and has been registered as an official seller of ``Seed`` as a public cloud store. This year, the compnay plans to complete the government certification (quality, CC, security) and open up the public cloud service market. Toast Cloud was developed as a game-specific cloud service in 2014, but the company expanded it for general use last year and released it as an integrated cloud solution.

By Kim Soo Yeon newsnews@


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