Nexon: Coke promotion led to one third of Korea playing our game

A partnership between Nexon and Coca-Cola for the Korean market, in which the online publisher's title KartRider was promoted with cans of Coke, saw around a third of the Korean population, about 16 million people, sign up to play the casual racing title - while at the same time Coke sales also rocketed in the product's most successful Korean marketing campaign ever.

Those results, revealed by Nexon CEO Joonmo Kwon in his keynote session at this year's Games Convention Asia, demonstrated not just the extent to which the Korean population is open to playing online games, but also how finding the right products can yield amazing results.

"It's for a mass audience, very easy, and not so addictive," he explained of the game, also linking the fact that the large female population that was drawn to the game had a knock-on effect in bringing a huge male audience into the title as well.

"Socialisation has no space or time restraints in terms of finding people," he said of the company's overall strategy, also citing the importance of interactivity and entertainment in those plans.

"We are not a game company," he stressed. "We're a global social interactive entertainment media company - the naming is important, because our thinking will follow that."

He also revealed that the company has 350 million users globally on its titles, of which MapleStory is one, with a regular concurrent user figure of 2 million people.

Kwon's keynote brought to a close the Games Convention Asia Conference for another year, held at the Suntec Convention Centre in Singapore.