Invest KOREA

The G-STAR 2013 Global Game Exhibition (G-Star 2013) will be held from November 14 for four days in Busan.

The event will be hosted by the Korea Internet & Digital Entertainment Association (K-IDEA), organized by the G-STAR Secretariat and sponsored by Busan City and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST). It will be the largest in the exhibition’s history with 2,261 booths, reflecting a 7.1 percent increase in the number of booths from last year.

The G-STAR B2B Composition is growing into the largest business market in Asia. This year’s B2B Exhibition will be the largest in its history with 1,026 booths, reflecting an increase of 41.3 percent in the number of booths from last year.

Korean companies, including Nexon, Neowiz Games, NHNent, Incross Co., LTD, Kakao Corp, ActozSoft, SmileGate Inc, Naver, CJ E&M, GAMEVIL Inc, COM2US and Daum, and foreign companies, including ChuKong Co., Inc, Ubisoft Entertainment, Sega, ChangYou.com, Tencent, Gameforge, Netease, COG, 17173.com, Mail.Ru GAMES, Game Power 7 and Taipei Computer Association, will participate in the B2B section.

B2C composition will consist of 1,235 booths, which is a slight decrease from last year.

Nexon, Daum, NEOCYON INC, Monawa, Nuri Star Ducks, Lucymedia, Xenics and other Korean companies are included in the participant list. Foreign companies, including Blizzard, Wargaming.net, Nintendo, Sony Corporation, NVIDIA, Oculus VR and SanDisk, will also participate in the exhibition. Microsoft will have a booth outside.

The G-STAR Investment Market, which drew 26 investment companies and 22 small- and medium-sized developers last year, will be expanded this year.

As trends in the game market shift their focus to the mobile platform, K-IDEA plans to organize the G-STAR Investment Market for start-ups that cannot afford booths in the B2B exhibition. More than 40 buyers and publishers will have investment and publishing consultation sessions with about 50 small- and medium-sized developers and start-up companies.

The G-STAR Conference, an upgraded version of the G-STAR Seminar, will be introduced this year. The conference will consist of 30 sessions in the two areas of game business and game technology. The number of speakers also increased five-fold from last year, and representatives from global companies, including Google, YouTube, DeNA and Oculus VR, will give lectures, showing the qualitative growth of the conference.

In particular, an executive of Oculus VR who won an innovation award at E3 this year, will give a keynote speech to meet game developers from Korea and abroad.

The G-STAR Secretariat held a catchphrase contest through social media last August and chose “Game Together, Dream Together” as the G-STAR catch phrase from 341 entries. The phrase refers to dreaming with games and the continued success of the game festival, where dreams come true. It was seen as the most appropriate, considering the young and dynamic image of G-STAR.

With G-STAR becoming one of the largest game exhibitions in the world, legal consulting services will also be provided for companies for the first time this year. K-IDEA and G-STAR Secretariat, with cooperation from Kim & Chang, have decided to provide free legal consulting services regarding the game business for all game-related companies participating in G-STAR.

Kim & Chang lawyers specializing in the game industry will be available at the consulting service.

A Busan official noted that the city will actively provide support to hold a successful and fun festival in which participating companies can achieve positive results and visitors can enjoy themselves.


Source Text

Source: Newsis (Oct. 14, 2013)

** This article was translated from the Korean.