Two months of researching the Asian video game market, both collectively and by nation, and I only have one question left:
Why do we make fun of Asian MMO gamers, again?
Take Kart Racer (Korean language website), the latest darling of the Asian tech-business sector. The game is free to play, encourages casual gaming, appeals to females and older gamers, is set to propel its publisher, Nexon Corp, to sales of $250 million next year, and according to Nexon, a quarter of all Koreans have played at least one game. The revenue comes entirely from micropayment purchases of non-unique items, avatars, and kart styles in the game, all of which are balanced, cheap, and readily available to all players, and most of which have no impact on any in-game competition beyond a beauty pageant pissing contest. In short, it is everything the rest of us in poor, benighted, beef-eating Cowboyland have been bitching for since UO first shat in our collective mouths and loudly exclaimed it to be candy.
A few net cafe starvation deaths on their part later, and we still look like the assholes. At least our starved and dessicated Korean bretheren died playing something fun.
Here's twelve million satisfied customers paying a dollar for rockets to blow their punky little anime opponents up, and fifty cents to dodge other's rockets (which, you'll note, puts the onus of cost on griefing), but not needing to do so to win, and all of this occuring in the context of five or ten minute play sessions against what are, by even odds, attractive Korean girls who aren't pretending to be elves. How is it that this model of gameplay comes from a country we western pundits all routinely categorize as favouring treadmills and long play cycles? We didn't just miss the boat, folks- we missed the ocean.
And it's not just Korea: all over Asia, normal adults are turning on their TVs to find interesting, mature MMO games marketed to them through slick commercials gloriously free of the neolithic titty shot that has come to stand in for a_clue_001 among the wretched broom-pushing fuckups the North American video game industry calls marketing experts. I couldn't walk into a mall, down a street, or into a subway station in downtown Taipei without seeing ads for RF Online or one of its many competitiors. Yes, giant billboard ads touting the virtues of MMO games, for all to see, rather than lusty Barbarella-inspired softcore porno fantasy art tacked to the musty walls of your local EB Games- a concept so novel to us, and yet so blindingly obvious to anyone but a human rutabaga or your standard game-publisher PR retard, that it makes me want to cry.
Asians don't all play games because they have no lives, they play games because adults marketed games to them like adults- games designed by adults, for adults. By contrast, PC Gamer and E3 are a middle-school circle jerk to a surreptitiously pilfered copy of the Sears lingerie catalogue, making those of us with more than four brain-cells to rub together accessories to the murder of a potential art form; nobody will respect computer games so long as nobody plays them. I have stacks and stacks of research material- average cost of home DSL installation, median age of net cafe patrons, polls of their habits and tastes- that tell me the North American market, with rare exceptions, is so far out of it's league that the current detente can only be explained by language barriers and an early American technological advantage. Once they learn to write manuals in English and hire a few more artists, the clueless, inbred shit-peddlers we've been saddled with for the last ten years will be plunging toilets and doing meth in the midwest.
Keep holding your dicks, boys- Mom won't notice her underwear section is missing for another few minutes yet.
