Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Dude, Where's My Digital Car?

Filed under
Misc

After graduating from college this spring, Kim Hyun Wook of Seoul had been expecting to launch into a career as an engineer. Instead, he has joined the ranks of professional race car drivers -- though he never has to leave home to hit the track.

Every morning, Kim logs on to his computer using the screen name of Sarang (Korean for "love") and races against rivals in an online game called Kart Rider for at least eight hours. For his cyber-driving, he gets paid real money by a local clothing company, which in turn emblazons its brand name on the virtual driver of a virtual car. "I feel like a star," says Kim, 21. "My fans send me gifts, and I have a sponsor supporting my life."

Sound wacky? Not to the millions of Koreans who play Kart Rider and other games like it. And certainly not to Nexon Corp., the game's creator. Nexon has built a booming business selling avatars -- digital representations of players online -- and virtual accessories such as cars and goggles. The company chalked up revenues of $110 million last year, some 85% of it from selling such digital doodads. This year, Nexon expects sales of $250 million. "The avatar market is prospering in Korea," declares Min Yong Jae, chief marketing officer.

CYBER-ACCESORISING. Blame it on broadband. In Korea, where about three-quarters of households have fast Internet connections, people are increasingly looking to the Web for entertainment. Nexon says more than 12 million people -- a quarter of all Koreans -- have participated in at least one Kart Rider race since the game was launched a year ago, and that as many as 200,000 of their colorful avatars might be piloting their cyber-cars through virtual forests, icy caves, or villages at any time.

The genius of Kart Rider lies in how Nexon makes money from it. Online gaming companies typically rely on subscription fees for games where players live a cyberlife in a fantasy world. But Nexon and a handful of others offer games such as Kart Rider -- and basic avatars and cars -- for free, then sell spiffed-up accessories.

Kart Rider's online store offers more than 100 digital items such as special $1 paint jobs and tools like 40¢ balloons that can protect a player's car by lifting it above the track when an opponent launches a missile (90¢). The most expensive car will set you back $9.80 (it handles a bit better than one costing $1.50).

"Most of my classmates play Kart Rider, and I want to look cool in the game," says 9-year-old Park Kun Hee, who recently bought an avatar costing $2.50, a car for $3.50, goggles for $2.50 (to see through smoke thrown off by opponents), and more. His father cut him off after he spent $150 on the digital stuff.

RACING ACROSS BORDERS. Now the pros have arrived. Kart Rider competitions have been broadcast on two cable channels, and Kim -- who has won several of them -- has emerged as a pop idol among gamers. A local apparel company, Spris Corp., sponsors Kim and three others as professional Kart Rider players. Some tournaments have been sponsored by the likes of Coca-Cola Co. (KO ) and offer as much as $50,000 in prize money.

For Nexon execs, the party is just beginning. They're hoping their success in Korea will be repeated elsewhere. "I'm 100% sure [the avatar business] will boom in China, Taiwan, Japan, and Thailand in three to five years," says Min, the marketing chief. Nexon is already seeing rising sales of digital items offered in those four countries for Nexon's other games, and the company expects revenues there to double, to about $40 million this year.

Though Nexon has no immediate plans to offer Kart Rider in the U.S., it's a pretty good bet that people across Asia will soon be racing around the digital track in personalized virtual cars. Could a World Cup of Kart Rider be far off?

Source.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.