Hellgate Guru

This article just made it’s way through my Google Alerts not too long ago:

A bold entrepreneur’s ambition of making South Korea the vanguard of the computer game industry has ended as an unaccomplished mission.

HanbitSoft CEO Kim Young-man on Monday sold two thirds of his shares to a relatively unknown game company named T3 Entertainment, making it the new largest shareholder of Hanbit.

We know Hanbitsoft as being the publishers of Hellgate London in Korea.

Kim, who founded Hanbit in 1999 as a local distributor of hit game “StarCraft,” said he will remain as the chairman for a while. But when reporters asked him about Hanbit’s future on Wednesday, he passively handed over the questions to Kim Ki-young, the chief executive of T3.

“I decided to sell the shares because the two companies share the same vision of becoming a leader in the global game market,” the outgoing CEO said in a press conference held on Wednesday.

It’s interesting to note that Hanbitsoft made such losses last year when they went with Hellgate London and while the article does not specifically blame Hellgate alone, it seems to imply that it was one of the strong factors for the loss.

As the next step, Kim decided to finance a massive game project called “Hellgate: London,” which was developed by the same team that created “StarCraft.” He expected it would be a new milestone of Korean game industry’s history. But the new game didn’t do very well, yet, and Hanbit recorded a 7.2 billion won loss last year.

Now having yielded about two thirds of his shares to the newcomers from T3, Kim showed that he no longer has the same power he used to have.

When a reporter asked whether there will be downsizing of the organization, the old Hanbit boss said the company will need more manpower, not downsizing. But an executive of T3 immediately rebutted his remark by saying “T3 aims to have a small but strong organization. We will reduce the organization where there is a need.”

Sad to see the company have to sell a lot of it’s shares as it seemed to be quite a strong force in the Korean market. Good luck to their new ownership though and hopefully they can do well in the future with whatever game projects they decide to take on. Also good luck to Kim with whatever he decides to do.

Enjoy