NHN Hangame Japan ranks as the second biggest game portal in Japan

NHN (Co-CEOs: Kim Bum-soo and Lee Hae-jin) disclosed on March 20 that their Internet game site Hangame Japan (CEO: Cheon Yang-hyun) ranked as the second biggest game portal in Japan.

Hangame Japan is the subsidiary independently established by NHN in Japan. It started formal operations in Japan in December 2000. With 1,850,000 memberships and more than 11,000 simultaneous users, Hangame Japan plans a full-scale diversification and seeks to advance into the game publishing business.

NHN’s Japan subsidiary expects game users to rapidly increase since Japanese traditional games such as mah-jongg and Japanese chess will be made available online.

Hangame Japan plans to operate a full-fledged publishing business to market promising Korean online games in Japan.

Through the business tieup with game service firm in Japan Gameon (CEO: Kim Jong-shin), Hangame Japan launched ‘Cheonsangbi’ early this month. ‘Cheonsangbi’ is an online game dealing with traditional heroism.

According to Hangame Japan CEO Cheon Yang-hyun, they expect subscribers to ultra-high speed Internet in Japan to exceed 10,000,000 by the first half of this year; thus translating into further growth for the game portal industry.

“We hope to emerge as the biggest Internet game portal in Japan by providing new services including game publishing, avatar, and chatting by the end of this year,” Mr. Cheon said.