MMPG KOREA

Massively Multiplayer Korea At E3, I spent a fair bit of time talking with South Korean developers and online game producers. I'm not sure I have a coherent picture, as of yet, but some salient points that may be of interest:

* There are over 100 MMGs on the market in Korea at present.
* Total annualized dollar gross is probably larger than the US market.
* Per-user community support costs are small, largely because of the PC baang culture. The split between PC baang (cybercafe) players and at-home players is moving more toward at-home--more than half of current subscribers are playing from home--but nonetheless, most people were introduced to this games in PC baangs. The advantage of a cybercafe environment is that you have a bunch of people nearby who know the game and can introduce it to you; MMGs are, typically, fairly hard games to pick up and play. Not only are there a lot of interface features to master, but just learning about the world itself takes a while. US MMGs typically provide large manuals, training missions, and in-game community support people to help out newbies; Korean MMGs don't.
* There is no retail market. Everything just gets pirated anyway. Clients are a free broadband download (and many games require broadband to play). Korea has a far higher rate of broadband adoption than the US. (Easy enough to see why; it's a country smaller than New England, with 40m people--not that hard to wire.)
* Korean MMG developers are (largely) convinced that the US market isn't worth the bother. Americans are too culturally alien. And besides, there's so much money to be made in China that who gives a crap anyway?
* One Korean game, Legend of Mir III, claims 700,000 simultaneously online users in China. (It's rare for EQ to have more than 100,000 online simultaneously). Yes, they pay a lot less on a per-user basis. But for some developers, China is extraordinarily lucrative.
* Because there is no retail market, a partnership with one of the big online portals in Korea is key to attracting a substantial user base there.
* In China, a relationship with either China Telecom or China Unicom is vitally necessary to reach users.
* In Korea, there's basically no console market, because they hate the Japanese, and have basically used trade barriers to prevent any widespread deployment of console systems.
* None of the Koreans I talked to really have a clear understanding of why the Korean games launched here have largely failed--or why the US games launched there have not done all that well, either. They chalk it up to "cultural differences," which strikes me as a glib and not necessarily useful explanation. After all, (some) Japanese games do just fine in the US, and in some ways, Korean culture is less alien to American culture than the Japanese. (Japanese avoid conflict; Koreans don't believe in bullshit.)

I'm interested in looking at that issue more deeply. I'm not sure I have any real solution, but some thoughts to occur to me:

1. Most Korean games are a great deal smaller than US games. The developers of Legend of Mir III proudly told me that it takes 2 hours to walk from one side of their world to another; EQ, when it launched, had world the size of Rhode Island.

2. Many Korean games are isometric 2D; virtually every US MMG since UO has been 3D.

3. Most Korean games promote PvP as a feature; the most successful US games are mainly PvE.

4. The Korean games that have launched here have not provided the level of community support that US gamers expect.

5. Koreans are used to dealing with a broadband, free client download world; all successful US MMGs to date work fine on a dial-up connection, and sell clients at retail.

Game Addiction and Autism

Study: Game Addiction Similar to Autism

Research presented at the British Psychological Society's Annual Conference this week suggests that people who show signs of being addicted to videogames exhibit many of the same symptoms as those with Asperger's syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism.

The University of Bolton's Dr. John Charlton and Ian Danforth of Whitman College questioned 391 gamers, focusing on the relationships (if any) between addiction, "high engagement" and personality. "Our research supports the idea that people who are heavily involved in game playing may be nearer to autistic spectrum disorders than people who have no interest in gaming," said Charlton.

The more intense the gaming addiction, the more likely the subject was to display three character traits commonly associated with Asperger's: neuroticism, a lack of agreeableness, and a lack of extroversion. In other words, people who do nothing but play videogames tend to be obsessive, shy, and unpleasant. Well, duh.

Good Game blog

http://blog.wired.com/games/