An HUFS student team won the Excellent Prize at the 2022 Nexon-GSOK Student Paper Competition. The Awards Ceremony was held on November 18, 2022 (Friday) at BEXCO, Busan, as part of the nation’s largest game fair, Game Show & Trade, All-Round (G-STAR) 2022.

The Nexon-GSOK Student Paper Competition was jointly hosted by Nexon (CEO Lee Jeong-Hun) and the Game Self-Governance Organization of Korea (GSOK) to promote and expand academic research in the gaming industry. The theme of this year’s competition was ‘What Social, Economic, and Cultural Implications Nexon Games Have on Korean Society.’

The winning team included students Lee Soo-Hyun (Business Administration, entry class of ’19) and Kim Yong-Hoon (Economics, entry class of ’21) from the Quant Marketing Society (QMS) of the HUFS College of Business (Dean Cho Joon-Seo). Their winning paper is entitled “How e-Sports Affect the Online Brand Awareness of Professional Sports Clubs and the Actual Number of Their Home Stadium Audience: Centered on FIFA Online e-K League and K League.” The paper is an empirical analysis of how e-Sports affect their real-life professional sports clubs through quantitative analysis. The paper was well received by the judging panel for two reasons: it focused on the new topic of the impact of e-Sports on the traditional professional sports industry, which has never been studied so far, and it presented the possibility of expanding e-Sports research through its innovative approach of addressing the topic via quantitative analysis.