Mobile messenger giants Tencent and LINE throw their weight behind Korean game designer, 4:33 Creative Lab
4:33 Creative Lab, a top Korean mobile game designer, has joined hands with two of the world’s largest mobile messengers – Tencent and Line Corp. The investment will help the company break into overseas markets and will assist in its plans to go public in 2015.
Announcing that it had successfully attracted funds from the mobile messenger operators, the Seoul-based mobile game company said that it intended to become a global powerhouse in the game designing market. If it achieves its mission, it will follow in the footsteps of a large number of successful Korean gaming companies that have emerged over the last ten years. These include NCsoft, Nexon, Smilegate, Com2Us, Neowiz, Netmarble, WeMade Entertainment, Devsisters, and many others.
“With the latest investment, 4:33 has secured reliable partners, Tencent and Line, which have a combined number of more than one billion subscribers in global markets including China, Japan and Southeast Asia,” So Tae-hwan, C0-CEO of 4:33 Creative Lab said. “The project will create a thousand possibilities for success and help revive the domestic game market too,” he added.
While the domestic gaming industry has been powerful over the years, there are fears that the Korean market will have become saturated by around 2015. Therefore, local gaming companies are being forced, more than before, to seek new opportunities for growth outside their domestic borders. In a similar trend, Devsisters, developers of Cookie Run, also partnered with LINE earlier this year. It went public recently, based on the strength of its international growth.
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Tencent runs WeChat, China’s biggest mobile messenger with 600 million users, and Line Corp. runs Line with around 560 million subscribers worldwide. It is thought by industry insiders that the messengers may be planning to introduce a gaming platform to their existing services, in much the same way Kakao Talk did back in 2013, to great effect.
The size of investment in 4:33 Creative Lab is around US$1oo million, making it the third Korean venture backed company to have received this amount of investment from overseas this year. The others are Coupang (invested by Sequoia Capital), and Yello Mobile (invested by Formation 8 Partners).
“4:33, which has achieved much success with its own mobile games including ‘Arrow’ and ‘Blade,’ will be able to help game startups increase their presence in the game market,” a 4:33 official said. The South Korean game designer is planning to go public next year in South Korea.
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