IFEZ Journal

Cheongna International City to Leap Forward as the Hub of the E-sports Gaming Industry

IFEZ plans to attract global gaming companies to Cheongna International City in cooperation with DigiPen Institute of Technology (in the USA), which is gaining a worldwide reputation for e-sports.

This will enable Cheongna International City to become a hub for the global e-sports gaming industry.

Creation of a Gaming-specialized Complex Focusing on the E-sports Industry

On May 17, IFEZ signed a memorandum of understanding on the creation of Cheongna G-Tech City with the Korea Land and Housing Corporation (LH), DigiPen Institute of Technology, and Daewon Plus Construction. G-Tech City’s vision is to make Cheongna International City into “Asia’s No. 1 gaming industry hub” by attracting global video-game companies in cooperation with DigiPen Institute of Technology, while specializing in e-sports.

The MOU stipulates that a total project cost of more than KRW 1.62 trillion will be spent to create a gaming-specialized complex focused on the e-sports industry across six blocks of the site area of approximately 260,395 ㎡ in Cheongna International City. It will be comprised of various facilities, including educational facilities for fostering talents in the global gaming sector, R&D facilities, innovation districts and studios for domestic and foreign gaming companies, knowledge industry centers, tourism MICE facilities, game entertainment districts, etc.

With the signing of this MOU, IFEZ plans to start the creation of a competitive complex in its earnest attempts to keep up with world-class e-sports clusters, such as campus-centered “urban innovation districts,” including Cornell Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island in New York, Kendall Square as MIT’s industry-academia collaboration model, Seattle’s U-District, etc. IFEZ has also been promoting various investment-attraction activities related to K-Pop and video-content production to foster the content industry.

‘Electronic Sports Industry’ to Become a New Growth Engine

The e-sports industry is being spotlighted as a new growth engine alongside the Korean-content market’s global expansion and as the transition to a non-face-to-face and online economy accelerates following COVID-19. The domestic e-sports industry reached KRW 20.99 trillion as of 2021. This representative K-content industry has been growing more than three times faster than the Korean economic growth rate (annual average of 3.2%) over the past 10 years (annual average of 9.8%), and in 2021, it showed a growth rate of 11.2%. It is a youth-employment-friendly industry with a higher employment-inducement coefficient than any other industry (source: Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) – “2022 White Paper on Korean Games”).

DigiPen Institute of Technology, a world-class university specializing in video-game production, is known as the “Harvard of the gaming world” in e-sports education, and it is a global university that operates branch schools in Singapore and Spain. The university, which has its main campus in Redmond, Washington, USA, is not just a university but is recognized for playing an important role in creating an e-sports industrial complex in the area. For that reason, it is expected to play a key part in the creation of this G-Tech City.

“I think Korea’s gaming industry, which has already grown remarkably, should now secure unparalleled industrial competitiveness by combining world-class technologies. In the future, I will cooperate more actively to attract a differentiated e-sports industry suitable for the city of Incheon.”

Incheon Mayor Yoo Jeong-bok

“The growth of the gaming industry in domestic and overseas markets, especially in mobile games, is steadily increasing and, in fact, the possibilities are limitless for the future! I believe that the international gaming industry cluster to be created in Cheongna will serve as a catalyst for the development of Cheongna International City.”

IFEZ Commissioner Kim Jin-yong