The first session after lunch is always a tough sell at any conference, with your less-than captive audience weighed down and sleepy with food and furious networking.

And so it was during the first day of MGF 2009, with an understandably wary (but amiable) Joony Koo of Korean publishing powerhouse Com2us taking to the stage to try and point out why the Korean market is so far ahead of our own.

First he provided a comparison of the recent top ten charts in Korea and the US (he opted to leave Europe out of these direct comparisons, what with the room being filled with top brass from each of the European operators).

He pointed out that there were very few common titles, with the likes of Tetris being a notable exception - and that was only a very recent entry in Korea.

“The big difference between the markets is the repurchase rate,” he said, with Korean users downloading many more games in comparison to their western counterparts.

Another reason for the market’s success, he said, was that “when we say something to the operators in South Korea, it echoes to the operators.” From his comments, there appears to be far more of a cooperative spirit in the South Korean market.

“We’ve been talking about revenue shares all day - we get 80 per cent from the games that are sold through the operators” which, as he points out, is even better than the iPhone model everyone seems to raving about.

These Korean operators also use external community sites to evaluate their games, rather than a detached internal workforce. This also results in a natural, healthy word of mouth campaign.

Another point of interest, and an added reason why the repurchase rate is so healthy in the Korean market, is the average price of games: $7.99 in the U.S. compared to $2.99 in Korea.

Joony referred to pricing in the west as a nonsense, claiming that a gamer who has a bad experience with a game will take the view that “I’m not gonna get ripped off twice.”

Games in Korea, it emerges, are focus tested by a user pool of 20-30 people, and if the average score drops below 75 per cent, the game will not be allowed to be released. In fact, “most games receive about two or three times of failure before getting released.”

Joony next touched on the marketing side of the business, comparing the number of featured games on western portals (around twenty) to the Korean model (just two).

“If it’s just two games featured that means that contend provider is going to get a significant amount of revenue,” he explained, adding “which means they’ll more likely try and get new aspects in the game, and they’ll really concentrate on getting the game really fun.”

By contrast, he’d noticed that the western model concentrated more on the brand, such as movie tie-ins.

Leading on from this, Joony said that last year he took ten games from the UK top twenty chart and gave them to a Korean user pool for examination. “On average, the game rating was from 50-60,” meaning that they would have been rejected for release in the Korean market.

Dipping briefly into figures for Com2us, Joony revealed that their Mini-Game Pack series (comprising four games) has received 8 million downloads, helping to lead to healthy profits for the company of around 35 per cent last year (“we don’t talk about revenue really, it’s always the profit in South Korea”).

He then briefly touched on the subject of micro-billing, which is “getting huge” in South Korea. It seems that the micro-billing revenue for some of their games (mainly multiplayer RPGs) exceeds the download revenue.

Next up was the subject of technology. Put simply, the Koreans love their gadgets: “you can’t really find any low-tier handsets” in the country, he said. On the down side, they have six mobile platforms to cover, which has led to Com2us developing a cross-platform development system over many years, called Weaver.

Just to ram the point home, and to really rub salt into the wounds, Joony admitted that “the Korean market is really a blessed market, and the findings you find in the iPhone business, we’ve been having that kind of environment in South Korea for more than five or six years now.”

His closing comment was that western operators can share the same success, but not in the way everyone seems to think.

“They don’t really have to take the iPhone model and copy it,” he said. “Developing an eco system is not a rocket science - it’s more a case of listening to what the Content Providers have to say,” and encouraging a system where “everyone can be heard.”