And

obviously you have even the best example in the West, which should have been it, they actually end up folding on the strategy. And they're like, wait, we're just going to go to the old package, good bottle themselves. And so it really does take this Nexon or anyone, any of the Korean developers or Chinese developers to be like, oh, wait, we have to think of a native solution because whatever's going on in the West, they didn't think about innovating in the way that these people actually have an existential threat where they need to. And so what happens with Nexon, like Nexon, obviously, you just mentioned, is the real innovator here? Do they just immediately like copy the strategy of shareware or what happens? No, they turn to the internet.

So I think by this point in our story, we're well into the 21st century. So now it's probably 2004, 2003, 2003, Nexon puts out a game in Korea called MapleStory on a free-to-play basis. And you're playing it online. So there isn't really a disk to, there is a client, obviously, that you kind of download, but it's really more of an online play experience. As a result, you have a little bit more control and they can figure out ways to sell you things in that context. But the real innovation happens in 2005 when they put out this game called Cart Rider.

And it's actually funny. I played MapleStory back in the day. Like, that was like the first Nexon game that I played. What is Cart Rider?

Because like, I've looked up Cart Rider and it looks like it's just like a Mario Kart. Is that fair? It is absolutely fair. It is essentially Mario Kart. It's an online version of Mario Kart. You're playing against other people on the internet. It's cartoony, it's fast-paced, and it's a racing sim, basically. And the innovation here, and this was, you know, you get back, you use the word innovation when you were introducing this a few moments ago. And I think that's really important to focus on because the Western publishers had what we classically understand to be an innovator's dilemma. And you ask about why it was kind of already on the decline here in 2005. Why weren't they a pioneer in this? And partly it's because they had so much stake in the legacy business. Just the catalog sales of their old games, the sales of the games that were running on the Quake engine that they had licensed, the anticipation of Doom 4, which was coming out in a few years, and they'd already taken large advances against that, which are going to need it to be recouped, etc. Created this pressure, this economic pressure that put them into this innovator's dilemma, where they were almost incapable of seeing this next turn of the page, this next innovation. You had to really start almost from first principles like Nexon did in order to really make it work. And I think that was the brilliant thing that Nexon was able to bring to market with games like MapleStory and particularly Cartrider. And I think they could see, in particular, that there was an opportunity to sell things in the game that weren't necessary to complete the game, if you will. And that was really the distinction that they made from Shareware. Because as long as the Shareware model was in place where there was this monolithic thing called the game, and you only got a part of it, there was still an incentive for piracy. The way they turned the model on its head with Cartrider, by giving the entire game away for free, the whole game, all the fun bits, there was nothing you didn't get as a purchaser or as a player of that game for free that you would have gotten had you paid for it. You got everything. And so by doing that, and again, so radical, I remember talking to Western publishers at the time, because I was on the speaking circuit in those days, and I would be giving talks at GDC or whatever. And I would mention Cartrider, and I'd talk to some of the old school publisher friends of mine in the audience, and they would be like, it's crazy, they're crazy, they're getting the whole thing away for free. And it was crazy on a certain level, but it was also genius, because they realized that their audience was a huge pipeline now, where anybody who was interested in the game, there would be no friction to them playing it, because there was no barrier, there's no financial barrier. So as long as they were capable of downloading the game, they were capable of playing it at the same level as any of their friends. And then they just upsold you cosmetic goods, other items that gave you status in the world. And again, that was just brilliant, because when a community formed around the game, suddenly things like cosmetics and things like status had real value, had social value, and they capitalized on that. And Cartrider was a massive success, and I think an underappreciated product in the history of the video game

business.