How Black Desert stayed strong after 8 years of live ops | Jeonghee Jeong interview

Pearl Abyss has been working on Black Desert Online since 2010. And the game has now hit 55 million registered users, and it’s still going strong with live operations today.

The game came out on mobile on Android and iOS in 2018. The game debuted on the Xbox in April 2019, and it hit the PlayStation in 2019.

I interviewed Jeonghee “JJ” Jin, CEO of Pearl Abyss America, about the continued success of the online game across all of its platforms. She talked about how the latest expansion, The Land of the Morning Light, bridged the game from its medieval fantasy roots to Korean mythology.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: You’re up to 55 million players now. That’s pretty impressive. In terms of what’s coming up, what are you talking about along with that?

Jeonghee Jeong: For an MMORPG that’s been live almost 10 years already, we’re still seeing user number growth. Black Desert is going strong in a lot of different countries. We’re very proud of that. We have 55 million registered users across all platforms – PC, both consoles, and both mobile platforms. The Black Desert IP, which started on PC first 10 years ago in Korea, has now spread out to more than 150 countries. We’re servicing the game in 12 different languages. We’re exploring more opportunities as well, any other platforms the games could live. We want to reach out to more audiences. We still believe this game is something more players can enjoy.

For our older players, in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, MMORPG is an old genre. To a newer generation, players in their late teens or 20s, it’s newer. A lot of them got started with games playing things like shooters, survival games, or even Roblox. We’re still drawing a lot of new users – young and old, men and women. Black Desert has a lot of content, a lot of different gameplay. It can appeal to different types of players – solo players, community players. In the Black Desert world we try to embrace a lot of different player groups and segments. We’re still seeing continuous growth as we add new content.

GamesBeat: How is the audience spread out across all those countries? Where do you see the most players and the most growth?

Jeong: It’s hard to pick just a couple of top regions for Black Desert. That’s one of the reasons for our long-lasting success. Black Desert is popular in many countries, both in Asia and in western regions. In Korea, of course, its country of origin, it’s still one of the most popular MMORPGs. But also in Japan, Taiwan, the U.S., Germany, and other European countries, Black Desert is still doing pretty well, still drawing a lot of players. It’s hard to pick just a couple of top countries that draw more revenue than others. That’s not easy to achieve with an MMORPG. It’s still only a small handful of games in history that have become very popular both in the west and in Asia.

GamesBeat: Is the Middle East taking off for you?

Jeong: Unfortunately, we don’t offer the game in local languages, but I’ve seen reports that Black Desert is still one of the most popular games played in some of the Middle East and western Asian countries. We’re looking at how we can serve those markets better. It’s mostly localization. But we’re already servicing 12 different languages. It’s something we’re looking into.

GamesBeat: Land of the Morning Light seems like it got more special notice.

Jeong: Yes. We had that big expansion last year. It’s heavily inspired by the Joseon Dynasty in Korean history. It was very unique content inspired by Korean folktales. As we put it together, we were a little worried. Black Desert is based on a medieval fantasy world. We wondered how the new content would fit into the existing world. But our devs did a very good job making everything fit together, and our players loved the content – the Korean culture, architecture, food, and music. We created a lot of traditional Korean music for Land of the Morning Light, so everything felt a little different from the rest of the world. But the stories are all linked together. The new region blended together with the existing Black Desert world.

Our players also really loved all the Korean folktale-inspired bosses. They’re all based on stories that I heard when I was growing up. It was very interesting to see how all those fit into Black Desert. A lot of players came back, and we drew a lot of new players. We’re now preparing for part two, the Land of the Morning Light: Seoul expansion. It’s a completely new region, an island, but when we launched it last year, we only opened up half of the island. Half of it was covered by clouds. Now we’re getting ready to open up the rest of the island.

GamesBeat: How soon is that coming out?

Jeong: We haven’t announced a release date yet. We’ll very likely have news on that in the middle of June. We have two big offline events each year. One is in the summer, Heidel Ball, every June. We’ll probably announce a release date at Heidel Ball 2024. We’re probably having the event in France. There’s a location in Black Desert, Heidel City. We’re going to do the event at the town in France that inspired Heidel City, Beynac-et-Cazenac. It has a famous castle, and we re-created that exact castle in Heidel.

GamesBeat: On consoles and mobile, are all the updates synchronized with PC?

Jeong: Not exactly synchronized across every platform. We’re trying to have big updates arrive simultaneously for PC and console, but sometimes that’s just not easy. When it comes to new classes, we try to update those simultaneously, or almost at the same time. With the new scholar class, we updated that to PC in December, and now it’s coming to console as well, in just a few days. We’re celebrating the fifth anniversary of Black Desert on Xbox and the fourth anniversary of cross-platform play between PlayStation and Xbox, so we’re updating with scholar to celebrate that together. Last year, for Land of the Morning Light, we updated it on PC first, and then a month or two later we brought the expansion to console as well. We’re going to try to keep that parity between console and PC.

Black Desert Mobile is a more different game – different content, different features. But in terms of classes, we try to have most of the classes work the same across the board. Sometimes they have different names for certain purposes. But you’ll find the same basic regions and classes across the platforms. Even the succession classes are all there on PC, console, and mobile.

GamesBeat: Someone referred to these recent updates as quality of life improvements.

Jeong: Land of the Morning Light is a full expansion. That’s pretty substantial. We also have smaller and medium-sized updates, things like quality of life. We usually bring out one, two, or even three classes per year. Those are big updates for us. We’ve been trying to bring at least one new class per quarter over the last couple of years, and I think we’ve been pretty consistent. Also, we try to do one or two big region updates each year. We’re trying to stay fast as we update with new content, especially for the veteran players who’ve been playing for five, six, seven, eight years.

Quality of life updates are things we’re always trying to bring in every month. But we’ve tried to bring in more PVP content recently as well. For example, War of the Roses is a 300-versus-300 big battle. We’re doing a pre-season right now. It launched in Korea first, a couple of months ago. Now we’re doing pre-season in the U.S. and Europe. We’re targeting an official launch soon. We’ve been looking at how it goes every other weekend, and it’s been working very well. It’s a very cool battle.

We also added something called Guild League, another very big battle. Black Desert is known as a good MMORPG for solo play, but we also have a good PVP system, and we’re adding more large-scale, guild-versus-guild content. A lot of players are enjoying the PVP content as well these days.

GamesBeat: What have you learned about running a live game in general? There has been some discussion about how games as a service might not represent as big a potential market as many publishers have thought. You may have to be one of the biggest franchises to be successful. There might not be 1,000 or 100 top games in the space, but maybe more like 15 or 20.

Jeong: It’s a good point. When we talk to players and journalists, they say, “I can only play one of these big games. I can’t play three, or even two.” If it’s going to take 100 or 200 hours of your life, most people just can’t play that many games. I think the market is still pretty big, but people make a choice, and many of them stick with that forever.

It’s also not easy to maintain this concept of games as a service for a long time, especially across a lot of different platforms. Black Desert has managed to successfully expand to other platforms, not just PC. A lot of other PC MMORPG franchises have tried mobile or tried console, but they’ve not been successful. Even for console and mobile, we’ve tried to keep our community very active, both in and out of the game. We have many GMs overseeing our live servers interacting with players day and night. We try to keep our in-game community as active and engaging as possible, so people keep coming back. They form a community where they can live in the game. We’ve been trying hard to maintain high engagement levels amongst those players.

An even higher level of effort went into the console and mobile versions. We felt that the console community, the mobile community, those players probably weren’t used to seeing this kind of live service as much as PC players. There was some opportunity for educating and learning both for us and for the players. For example, a lot of console players weren’t used to MMORPGs yet. It can be confusing. By giving them more fun experiences, more engagement and interaction with our community team–I feel like they’ve really enjoyed that.

We also try to provide more interactions between ourselves and the community outside of the game. One way we do that, we run a lot of offline events, both big and small. Just two days ago we held our second Adventurers’ Oasis event for this year. We usually refer to our players as “Adventurers.” We created this meet-and-greet event, and we held three or four just in the U.S. last year. This year we held one in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and another one celebrating our anniversary in Los Angeles. We had players mingling and playing games together. I took a lot of selfies with players who wanted to pose with me. It was a lot of fun.

Whenever we meet our players, it seems like they just really love being part of the community. This type of live service game becomes a big part of their lives. It’s not just a game that they play. A lot of our players have made friends in the game. Some have met their spouses in the game. I met two married couples at our event on Saturday, thanking us for making a game where they found each other. It was a lovely experience. Whenever we do offline events, I’m impressed by our community and the power of this concept of games as a service. As a community, it’s really strong.

GamesBeat: What have you learned about how to monetize these kinds of games? What have you found that works? Has that changed much, or has it always stayed the same?

Jeong: Our monetization strategy definitely evolved over time. I don’t think we’ve changed a lot of things, though. There are principles that we want to stick to. We make more of our money from in-game sales compared to package sales. In our eighth year in the U.S. we see a lot more revenue coming out of in-game sales. But we still try to avoid making it a pay-to-win game. Everyone has a different definition of exactly what that means, but we try to just offer more options to players. If players are interested in going faster, if they just don’t have much time to grind–in most MMORPGs you have situations where players have to grind for something. But we try to provide options, and often the option is just to buy something. We try to not have just one set way to get stronger. Also, not everything is about growth. We also just have a lot of vanity items, things that are cool to have. If you want something pretty for your character, you can buy the things you like.

GamesBeat: Are there some obvious ways that AI is starting to affect the development of your game? Is there any clarity around where it’s useful yet?

Jeong: We’ve been looking at AI for all kinds of development, and also for live services. Just to name a few, even things like translation–we’re looking at how AI can improve our global service, helping with translation and localization. Also, a big part of our development has been fueled by AI already around things like interaction between NPCs and players. Those are getting better and better thanks to AI. With generative AI, developers can do even more. I can’t give specific examples that we’re working on, but there’s been a lot of research going on. We’re already experimenting in development and live services around how AI can speed our processes up, make things easier and faster. We’re definitely working on that.

GamesBeat: As you invest in new technology in tools, is AI the biggest investment right now, or is it still other things?

Jeong: I’d say AI is one of our biggest investment areas. Not just in terms of financial investment or M&A, but we’re doing a lot of R&D in the AI space. We’re looking at a lot of new teams and technology for game development and live operations. AI is a big item on the agenda for us.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz