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I found out that 2021 Arm Mali Graphics Championship was held through social media. It was a competition where the world’s major game studios participated, and I thought it was an interesting opportunity for me to actually test the skills that I had developed at work, since the things that I did at work for performance optimization and the requirements of the competition were quite similar. Also, I decided to participate in the competition, because I wanted to prove and test the direction applied to the things that I did at the moment. It was an opportunity to know more about the performance optimization process and Arm Mobile Studio , and I am especially delighted to have achieved a good result.

The major role of Publishing Coordination Office of NCSOFT is to carry out performance optimization through collaborating with Development Office with regards to diverse internal projects that are waiting to be launched. I believe that there was a good synergy, because the objectives of the Arm Mali Graphics Championship 2021 and the things that I currently do at work were quite similar. In particular, I am closely collaborating with many competent developers at NCSOFT to get new knowledge and experience every day. I believe the efforts have been accumulated to help me win this competition.

Although the preparation time for this competition was not long, it was still enough for me to understand and review the tools and graphics required to address the issues. I also applied the materials provided by Arm Mali and the tips provided through the webinar on performance optimization that was held in the beginning of the year.

The Publishing Coordination function is divided into two parts: technology and development. The Technology Part is responsible for the management of projects related to the technologies required to launch mobile games in NCSOFT. The Development Part is divided again into the ones responsible for game performance optimization, Game Performance Analytics (GPA), and Global Trend Analytics (GTA) development.

The major role of the Development Part of the Publishing Coordination function is to not only manage game technologies, but also shed light on the importance of development to contribute to the company’s games. Also, in the case of the Performance Optimization Team that I belong to, we carry out performance optimization through collaboration with relevant teams like the Development Team before the game is launched in order to secure stability in the game and to optimize its performance. We support game development through the Engine Team of the Game Development Office based on three pillars, including mobile performance optimization, memory optimization, and game stabilization. Some major projects that I have carried out and am carrying out will include ‘Trickster M’, ‘Blade & Soul 2’, and ‘Lineage W’.

I believe that performance optimization becomes a stepping stone for a game to be even more successful.

Also, it is important in the sense that it enhances the game’s stability and adds more details to it. Even if a game has a solid story and attractiveness, playing it can never be satisfactory if its attractiveness fails to be delivered to the players due to frequent crashes, etc. Therefore, I believe that we may expand the user base only if we enable performance optimization to cover as many devices as possible through proper tuning.

Before I joined NCSOFT, I started my career working in performance optimization for a mobile device and a PC GPU manufacturer. At the time, I developed GPU drivers to learn about how the GPU worked and characteristics of the HW; I also was responsible for mobile and PC target service performance optimization and bug correction. Based on such experience, I took the role to support game performance optimization in NCSOFT. 

I wish to continue to provide as much support to the performance and stability of the games of NCSOFT. People often believe that ‘optimization’ would mean a compromise on quality; however, our final objective is to maintain the best graphic quality, while further improving performance at the same time.