“Is this a good idea for me to start a business?” by Addison Kang.

Good morning everybody, it’s Wee You here again!

Yesterday evening, Mr. Addison Kang, former CEO of Asiasoft, visited our school and gave a detailed speech on basically entrepeneurship and the game industry. The main topic he focused on was whether it was a good idea to start a business.

A point he brought up that was very interesting was the passion in this industry itself. It has always been a big debate on whether passion itself was enough to start and drive a business. Even after the talk, there was discussions on whether solely passion was a realistic approach to start a business. He mentioned that money is indeed important, but it should not be seen as the primary goal of entrepeneuership, which I sort of agree with. In my personal opinion, passion alone is not enough, but w/o that passion, it is almost impossible to succeed in this industry.

Another interesting point he made was about the potential of the game industry. He mentioned about “DoTA” being the sole game played currently in LAN Shops, and that most of the gamers in Singapore are playing this game. He then said, “90% of the gamers in LAN Shops are males”. This shows that there are still a lot of “non-gamers”, and hence potential new customers if your game could attract them.

Besides the gender approach, he also gave a quick case study on why MapleStory is so successful. The mainstream games were “hack-n-slash” MMORPGs with beautifully rendered models, such as WoW, and Wizet decided that that genre was too saturated. They then decided to move in a different direction, which created MapleStory.

In the talk, he brought up a lot of interesting points such as the “hype curve”, and the “global economy for games”. It was a very meaningful talk, and I had learnt a lot of things from it.

Gotta go chiong project now baby! Goodbye!