Royal Blood: How Gamevil is betting big on a mobile MMO

Few projects are as ambitious as Royal Blood, a massively multiplayer online fantasy role-playing game for smartphones and tablets. Gamevil plans to release the title later this year, and it’s already clear that it represents a big bet on an original intellectual property in the $46 billion mobile games market.

Massively multiplayer online games caught on in Asia in a big way — and nowhere more so than South Korea. And it’s no surprise that MMOs on mobile devices are also taking off in that country. Seoul-based Gamevil is an underdog in the market, as it must compete with rivals, such as Netmarble, which has scored a huge hit with Lineage 2: Revolution, a mobile MMO that generated $176 million in its first month in South Korea alone, and it has since gone on to top the charts in many Asian countries.