3GSM 2007: Million-selling mobile RPG Hero's Lore coming to Europe
South Korea's top multiplayer RPG heads West
As well as World Poker Tour 2, Hands On Mobile also announced yesterday that it's going to bring out Hero's Lore 2: The Knight Of The Frozen Sea in Europe.
Hands On's Eric Hobson told me that the game was originally developed by the publisher's Korean development studio, and has been wildly popular over there, topping the sales charts.
"Handset memory size is less of an issue now in Europe, so we're starting to look at our Korean games, and whether we can bring them over," Hobson explains.
"With Hero's Lore, we're debating whether we do it as a Symbian game, or a high-end Java game. Probably Symbian, because the operators are more open to Symbian now."
The game is a multiplayer (as in over the network) RPG with more than 200 characters, 100 'map scenarios' and 1,000 'community guilds'. It launched in November last year, and players are apparently racking up over 1.5 million online battles every day.
"It's taken off like a train over there," says Hobson. "It even spawned its own comic book series! It's probably the only mobile content outside of Crazy Frog that's spawned its own licensing products."
Hands On hopes to bring more of its Korean games to Europe in the future too, having shown a bunch of them to mobile operators at a recent meeting, to what Hobson describes as a favourable response.
It's anyone's guess if a game like Hero's Lore 2 will be as popular over here, but the RPG geek in me certainly hopes so. Click 'Track It!' to follow the story.
