A Month in Korea
Hello family and friends!
I apologize for sending you all the same piece of life-spam about our first month over here in Korea. I am writing this as partially a journal to myself, as well as a news update for a large number of people; I hope you will forgive me and not be offended.
I have broken this up into three sections: Game Business, Korea (not business), and Family News.
Game Business:
Taldren founded Taldren Korea, Ltd. (TK) in August of this year and I moved out here to run the studio and head up our first project. TK is fully project financed following in the Taldren tradition of no debt and no investment (however, we are giving serious though to some capital raising). I have a team of about 10 here plus some very close contractors and we are hard at work on a lengthy pre-production for the MMO we are working on.
Zach Drummond, Sean Dumas, and Ken Yeast are in California running our development work over there, we have some new contracts that are pretty interesting that I will disclose later.
TK also enjoys a 7-year tax holiday plus a 3-year extension of 50% off. What a deal!
I like working with Koreans, they are very hard working; we work from about 10 am to about 9 pm M through F. I have yet to work a weekend day (how nice it is to be home with the family). (They have an extremely convenient order-in system where we eat on real plates with real silverware for about $3 a person and it is delivered and the dishes are picked up and the whole bill is charged to the company account.)
Koreans are very passionate about game playing and making. They have a development conference it seems about once a month. I have spoken at 4 conferences so far and have enjoyed 3 round-trip business trips, a cash payment for speaking, a nice wooden box, a nice polo shirt, a nice paper-weight and nice mouse pad, a clock and a very cool 128MB jewelry-like USB memory stick all as gifts for being a speaker. I am going to another conference tomorrow night ? this time I don?t have to speak but hey I still get a dinner! As a result of these talks I have been written up in the newspapers 3 or 4 times, a 2-page review of a talk in PC Power magazine and my last talk will appear on cable.
I have made some great friends here in Korea on these talks including Mark Terrano, Bruce Shelly, Tim Train, Robert Huebner, Ian Livingston, Jack Porter and many more as well as continued relationships with my friends Ray Muzyka and Mark Rein. Not to mention a whole horde of interesting people all over Asia in the game industry.
I met one of my Starfleet Command fans here and we went out drinking and seeing the town. I envy the bastard ? he works 3 days a week 4 hours each day and makes scads of money due to a savvy promotional plan.
Business cards only cost me $27 for all of my employees? cards combined including the setup charge. If anyone needs cards done, I think I should setup a side business.
Seoul owns the country so it is really easy to get stuff down, just pop in a taxi or ride a subway and you are able to get anything legal/business/banking done inside of the day. It is great.
It really isn?t so hard not knowing Korean, in fact my employee?s English skills are much more rapidly improving than my Korean. I am just having too much fun working on the project to set aside time in the day to study. Bad, must fix.
My book is being translated into Korean and the local publisher is great and easy to work with. They are very eager to do a great job on the translation so we are having some of the TK guys QA the translation - this is a first afaik. I will also be putting my slides from my talks into the Korean edition for some value added.
They pay for everything pretty much with wires. Intra-Korean payments are made effectively instantly. They have a annoying 10% VAT where everyone acts like they are passing a hot potato and everyone dutifully invoices each other and lets the government know where all the money is going. Except all of the small, local shops.
Korea
First of all it must be noted that Korea is cold. At least right now. That has been reinforced upon my mind several times now. First of all, today as I stepped onto the sidewalk Korea leaped up and smacked me on the ass. Actually, I cartoon style slipped and fell on the ice that is outside my apartment. Ice. From the snow. Snow! It snowed last Sunday! It was beautiful.
There is still snow all over the city. Amazing. The only time I didn?t live in Southern California I lived in Hawaii. So this cold thing is really new to me. It has gone down to ?5C at night and sometimes the daytime high is 1 or 2C! Wow. So I dress in layers. But I hate sweaters or long-sleeve shirts and I stubbornly wear my T-shirts below a casual dress shirt, then a fleece inner jacket, then a gortex outer shell. I now wear spiffy gloves and a scarf. The Korean men all wear cool trench coats and long coats. I am looking at getting one myself.
The Korean people are always amazingly nice. One old lady even insisted on sharing my ATM booth with me when I paused too long to examine the screen and even grabbed my card and inserted it into the machine (too nice ? back off lady). The service here is just amazing from the utilities to the stores to personal and business relationships to random people off the street ? I think in the USA we have allowed our manners and graces fall into disrepair.
I found out that homes in what we would call the suburbs of southern California with real land beneath them are actually quite reasonable like $160,000 for a house and land. (That is a great deal coming from Orange County).
They have these great Saunas here where for a few bucks you can soak in luxury ? one just opened up across the street from our shop and they have the ceiling covered in Amethyst geodes! Good fun.
Family
We moved into our own apartment last weekend (until then we stayed in two rooms of my partner Hong?s home). What a great deal: we have about 1300 square feet, 3 bedrooms, an enclosed balcony and a view of the very close hills (with snow on them) from both sides, all-wood interior decoration, including the heated wooden floor (its cold here) and a all of this is brand-new ? it is a brand new apartment bldg. I never lived anywhere band new before. All for $1000 a month! (We had to put down a significant deposit though.)
Kyle (my 2-year old son) is a super star of Korea. Koreans love kids, but they especially love him because he is mixed (0.5 Taiwanese, 0.25 German, 0.25 Anglo-Saxon mix). He cannot walk down the street without girls and women stopping to smile at hi, hug him, kiss him and give him treats. They have these really cool board game rooms, where we have gone in to play games and Kyle has been whisked away by 2 to 5 girls at once to be played with, share lolly-pops and in general receive their affection. I am quite jealous of Kyle. I try to remind myself that he is half my clone so it should be fine with me. It?s not. I want to be 2 years old again!
My wife Kai-wen is happily taking intensive Korean lessons 5 days a week 3 hours a day and studying a good fraction of the rest of the day. Her Mom is with us and takes care of Kyle and is a wonderful chef for the family.
Kai-wen and her Mom are happy with Korea as it is somewhat of a in in-between between Taiwan and Japan in some respects, but of course unique in many other ways. Being Taiwanese she will pick up the language very fast as she already is fluent in Taiwanese, Mandarin, and English and has some ability in German and Japanese.
We have all new appliances to go with our new apartment, new language, culture, country and business! Whew! A lot of new.
In the future I hope to have an Everything site setup courtesy of Lan and Erin (employees of Taldren in CA). There I will post photos from Korea in the future.
May you spend your holiday seasons with your friends and family and cheers to a happy future for all!
My warmest to all,
-Erik Bethke
Topic: A Month in Korea (Read 4174 times)