Making Money with Games

It's been an awesome few months working for OGPlanet, an online free-to-play games publisher. They are a Korean run company based out of Los Angeles, CA with another office here in Vancouver (where most of the magic happens) and one in Korea. Basically what my company does is takes games that were created in foreign countries (usually Korea) and "Americanizes" them for the western world. Translations, technical changes and basically an overall marketing transformation is needed to capture a new audience for the games. After testing and making sure the games will be successful, OGPlanet will transform these games and put them on the market for the ever-increasing amount of players who take part in online gaming. We make our money through micro-transactions by selling virtual items in our games for small amounts of money. With the hundreds of thousands of players we have, you can see that this type of business model would be successful.

Over the years, video games have evolved from playing very simple games such as tetris, pac-man and other single-player games to massive multiplayer online games where millions of people from around the world can simultaneously play with each other and interact on a social level as well. From playing with your best friend right beside you to playing with someone you don't know from Germany or China or South Africa really makes you think about how far we have come with technology.

In my job, my responsibility is to make sure as many people as possible are seeing our games, thinking about them, and eventually trying them out. We display banners of our games on websites that the types of people who generally play our games go to. This could be video game fan sites, blogs, review sites or any others we feel may get visitors who might like to play our games. I am in charge of a budget and am constantly talking with AdNetworks who display our banners, making sure that everything is running smoothly and I also assist our design team with the creation of these banners. I come up with the words and phrases and they do all the fancy stuff. I also work with websites to come up with other promotional ideas such as prize giveaways and ways to increase the attention on our games.

To keep our players with us we do lots of things to make sure they are happy and involved. We have lots of fun events for people to participate in and I generally organize a lot of the material and communication necessary to run these events. Research is also an important part of my job as I am constantly seeing what the current trends are in the gaming market, what our competitors are doing and look into better ways we can promote our games.

Overall I'm having a great time here and learning a lot every day. Doing something that I love makes waking up early and going in every day not feel so bad. Being by a computer all day really gets me motivated to do active things though. I go to the gym most days at lunch and soccer takes up at least 3 nights a week. One after-work thing that has very much declined since I've been working here, can you guess? Gaming...

Downtown Living!

It's been about 2 months now that we moved into our new place in the West End of Downtown Vancouver. On the corner of Davie and Bidwell, our 31 floor apartment building stands well above the rest. A one minute walk to the English Bay beaches and a 5 minute walk to the famous Stanley Park, the worlds largest urban park. On the 28th floor our view is amazing, facing the downtown area to the east and the mountains to the north, it really can't get any better. Who needs a TV when we have a view like that?

We have everything within walking distance which is a great change from what I was used to and especially Rach having to drive at least 10 minutes to the nearest stores. Groceries stores, produce, restaurants, beer store, theatres, arena and clothing stores literally right outside our door. A quick run to get some milk for cereal suddenly doesn't seem like too much of a chore.


It's been great so far to experience this type of living. It's exciting to see the busy stream of people, cars and buses all making there way around frantically in such a dense area. The nightlife is big and seems like there's never a dull moment. If you can get over the consistent stream of sirens that can be heard at any hour, the crammed buses and be able to resist the urge to go in every store you see, downtown living may just be for you!