Since 2015, the 12 Regional Global Game Centers, expanded nationwide, aim to alleviate the concentration of the game industry in the Seoul Metropolitan Area and foster balanced regional development. As of 2025, approximately KRW 29 billion is invested annually. However, despite over a decade of policy implementation, academic research on its effectiveness remains limited. This study investigates the budget trends of Regional Global Game Centers through literature review and data analysis. It compares and analyzes the number of game development and publishing businesses, employees, and sales figures in 2014 (prior to center establishment) and 2023 (latest statistics) to explore changes in regional distribution and the effect of decentralization. The analysis reveals that over the past decade, the proportion of game development and publishing businesses in the Seoul Metropolitan Area decreased by 6.4% to 10.3% across all indicators (number of establishments, employees, and sales), confirming a partial decentralization effect. Notably, positive changes such as increased regional employment and an expanded share of sales were also observed. However, despite the overall South Korean game industry's average annual sales growth of 4.6% from 2021 to 2023, a significant problem was found: most regions excluding Seoul experienced an average annual sales decline of 2.6% to 5.6% during the same period. This suggests that despite the partial alleviation of metropolitan concentration, the policy had limitations in achieving its goals of fostering self-sustaining growth and revenue generation for the regional game industry. In conclusion, while Regional Global Game Centers contributed to quantitative decentralization, their impact on qualitative growth, especially in terms of sales increase, was insufficient.

This study explored the effectiveness and areas for improvement of regional global game centers through in-depth interviews with experts in the game industry. The expert interviews revealed a generally negative perception regarding the current effectiveness of these centers. Nevertheless, the majority of experts argued for the continued existence of regional global game centers. Perspectives were offered suggesting that the high performance attributed to the Seoul metropolitan area might be an illusion created by a few large corporations, and that the role of regional global game centers is crucial in the current market structure where indie games are gaining prominence. Furthermore, the phenomenon of Seoul-based companies relocating to regional areas could have a positive effect by allowing developers with the will and experience in game development to remain in the industry and thrive in local regions. As for improvements, increasing the expertise and fairness of evaluation committees and developing and applying innovative evaluation metrics that reflect the unique characteristics of the game industry, rather than outdated quantitative performance indicators (KPIs), were prioritized. Specifically, given that games do not generate revenue during their development period and create high value with a small number of personnel, the experts criticized uniform metric targets like sales or new hires, stating they lead to superficial game development and marginalize promising small-scale companies.