From Mobile Gacha Games to a Multibillion-Dollar Company: Shift Up's Business as an Example of the South Korean Gaming Market Development

The development of Shift Up mirrors the journeys undertaken by many Asian gaming companies. The studio transitioned from mobile game development to expanding onto other platforms, moving from local hits to producing AAA products for a global audience.

Shift Up's history is closely linked with MMORPGs, a genre that has significantly influenced the development of the South Korean gaming market. Local gamers have historically favored predominantly free-to-play games for PCs (and later mobile devices) like Lineage, MapleStory, or Blade & Soul.

An experienced artist, Kim Hyung-tae, worked on the latter as an art director. Early in the 2000s, he was responsible for character design in the RPG series Magna Carta, but outside South Korea, his name was relatively unknown.

After spending eight years on Blade & Soul, Kim decided to leave NCSoft shortly after its release. In short, the reason was general fatigue and unfulfilled ambitions. Kim wanted to create new games and incorporate his artistic style into them, but he was intimidated by the prospect of dedicating the next decade of his life to yet another MMORPG.

"NCSoft's pipeline was tailored for blockbusters, and I was burdened by such prolonged development timelines," the developer noted.

Instead, he planned to create a mobile game with his favored stylized graphics and a much smaller scale. With this goal, Kim founded Shift Up in December 2013, which over 11 years developed from a small studio into a publicly traded company with global ambitions.