earticle

영어

Since 2015, the 12 Regional Global Game Centers, expanded nationwide, aim to alleviate the concentration of the game industry in the Seoul Metropolitan Area and foster balanced regional development. As of 2025, approximately KRW 29 billion is invested annually. However, despite over a decade of policy implementation, academic research on its effectiveness remains limited. This study investigates the budget trends of Regional Global Game Centers through literature review and data analysis. It compares and analyzes the number of game development and publishing businesses, employees, and sales figures in 2014 (prior to center establishment) and 2023 (latest statistics) to explore changes in regional distribution and the effect of decentralization. The analysis reveals that over the past decade, the proportion of game development and publishing businesses in the Seoul Metropolitan Area decreased by 6.4% to 10.3% across all indicators (number of establishments, employees, and sales), confirming a partial decentralization effect. Notably, positive changes such as increased regional employment and an expanded share of sales were also observed. However, despite the overall South Korean game industry's average annual sales growth of 4.6% from 2021 to 2023, a significant problem was found: most regions excluding Seoul experienced an average annual sales decline of 2.6% to 5.6% during the same period. This suggests that despite the partial alleviation of metropolitan concentration, the policy had limitations in achieving its goals of fostering self-sustaining growth and revenue generation for the regional game industry. In conclusion, while Regional Global Game Centers contributed to quantitative decentralization, their impact on qualitative growth, especially in terms of sales increase, was insufficient.