Nexon USA's Daniel Kim

No, I think that there were a lot of doubters in the market here, but we experienced in Asia how the market progressed, and what the impact was when we offered it. Again, it's about access - not just playability, user interface, and that sort of thing.

The barrier to entry is zero - you just have to download it for free, and there are no limits, no velvet ropes, so you can play it for as long as you want and get as high as you can. Whether you spend money on it or not, it makes it a really attractive option for your entertainment.

Hindsight or not, we knew it was going to be a success coming into this market - we just had to provide enough infrastructure to generate enough revenue, from things like pre-payment cards. That had to be in place for us to really be able to sustain the business - and we've done that pretty successfully over the past couple of years.

We're really excited about the growth of Facebook games, because it's actually bringing a lot of non-gamers into the gaming space - the more the merrier. It's growing the industry, and all the Facebook games - you may have noticed - are backing the same model that we have.

People are used to playing the games for free and buying stuff online, so it's doing a lot of education for us. They also have great accessibility - the fact that they are jumping off of an existing community makes them very strong.

All of our games are highly interactive, based on strong bonds and relationships that get created within the game, so one of the initiatives we're launching this year is a rebrand of the website, to BlockParty.com - that's going to be providing a lot of the social hooks and community features that don't exist on our portal right now. It'll allow our users to connect with each other outside of the client.

Aside from that, we're also focused on launching games that are more browser-based - without any downloads - MapleStory iTCG, which went into beta last month, is our first foray into that game space, and it's been really exciting for us.

The more we expand our portfolio - part of our focus this year is to work with developers locally to expand it in the non-download, non-client space. So we'll definitely be looking for opportunities there.

Well, it's been a pretty exciting past couple of months - we've doubled our portfolio. We have Dungeon Fighter online, which opened last Winter. It's in beta, and we're going to be officially launching that over the next couple of months.

Meanwhile we put into live service PopTag, which is a hyper-puzzle action which is really exciting, plus MapleStory iTCG... so it's a big first quarter.

And then in the second half of year there's a big game coming up for us, which will really revolutionise the thinking about the quality that's available from free-to-play games. Because of MapleStory's fame, a lot of people's perception of free-to-play titles is this arcade, 2D-style stuff.

But the games we're going to be launching in the second half of the year and early part of next year will really be giving console titles a run for their money in terms of graphic quality and gameplay.

Mabinogi Heroes - which we'll rename and announce soon - is actually the first game to use the Source Engine from Valve. We've modified it so we can use it in a multi-player online setting, and it's got all the physics, graphics and gameplay quality, narrative, art... we're proud to put it up against any console titles out there.

So it's going to be a big year for us, this year.