Dated: 2022.04.05.
This article's information has been translated from the original article: link
Supercent (CEO Gong Jun-sik), a subsidiary of 111%, announced today that it has secured a seed round of investment worth KRW 16 billion, paving the way for the vitalization of the domestic hyper-casual game ecosystem.
The investment was led by Shinhan Venture Investment, Mirae Asset Venture, and Mirae Asset Capital, while 111%, Supercent's parent company, confirmed an additional investment of KRW 7 billion.
With this investment, Supercent plans to aggressively develop its business to build and expand the domestic hyper-casual ecosystem, including expanding its publishing business and expanding its hyper-casual game development pipeline.
Supercent, a 111 percent subsidiary established in April last year, focuses on hypercasual game development and publishing. It is targeting the global market with a strategy of analyzing various cultural trends and consumption patterns of viral content, quickly finding gaming fun elements and reinterpreting them into hypercasual, simple-to-operate and immersive games.
In particular, Supercent generated 40 million downloads in the first year of its existence based on its expertise in adtech, a key element of the hypercasual game business. The company generated more than 95% of its revenue from overseas, including North America, a major market for the hypercasual genre, and became profitable in 2021, its first full year of operations, proving its capabilities as a hypercasual developer.
In addition, in December last year, the company entered into a strategic partnership with global content studio ‘Astory’ to expand the global IP business of K-content through hypercasual games. Based on this, a hypercasual game of the Netflix original "Kingdom" is about to be released.
Hypercasual is the fastest-growing and most-played mobile game genre in the world. With 15 billion downloads globally last year, it accounted for approximately 33% of all mobile game downloads, nearly doubling from 2019.
"Hypercasual games, characterized by lightweight and short playtime, have captured the needs of Generation MZ users who prefer short-form content, which is spreading globally, and have the potential for even greater growth," said Gong Jun-sik, CEO of Supercent. "With this investment, we will support various domestic developers and partners to grow together and activate the domestic hypercasual game ecosystem.”