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General: Aihoshi: It's Different Across The Pond
Dana
Member Posts: 2,415
In this week's F2P column, looks at how too often Eastern and Western markets are considered their own homogeneous groups with their own homogeneous desires.
Despite the huge and rapidly growing number of people who comprise the free to play audience in the western hemisphere, there's still a lingering perception that it's a Far Eastern phenomenon, and just a secondary market here in this half of the world. As an extension of this inaccurate simplification, each of the two regions is quite often treated as relatively homogeneous.
This too is a fallacy. The west isn't a single market. While it may be convenient to assume North America and Europe are similar, that doesn't make it so. I'm definitely more familiar with F2P here than across the pond, so to investigate the differences, I enlisted the aid of Spencer Chi, who is the Operations Manager for Aeria Games Europe. In this role, he oversees Shaiya and Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine Online in Germany, France and Turkey, and is also responsible for investigating other European territories. Before that, he worked in the US office and launched three MMORPGs in the North American market.
Read it all here.
Dana Massey
Formerly of MMORPG.com
Currently Lead Designer for Bit Trap Studios
Comments
A great article! Some good info on the differences between the markets and on how players in different regions choose their games.
It has me curious as to how the box sales and retention compare between the two regions. From the mentioned differences, it seems that MMOs probably experience much higher initial box sales and numbers in NA but longer retention in EU.
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Excellent entry.
I am a MMORPG gamer of the first generation of MMORPGs, starting with Meridian 59 and afterwards EverQuest 1. I am also from germany, and have probably played most Pay-to-Play and a few Free-to-Play MMOs. Let me say that the divide between the European and the North American Market is far bigger than many on either side seem to believe.
I have played on US servers, on international servers, on english-speaking european servers and on dedicated german-language servers, so I believe I know a bit about the differences, and I would like to emphasize that the divide between both markets is growing, and its growing pretty fast.
As a whole, the european market seems to prefer a slower, more complex or intricate design. This is already apparent in the Offline-Genre, but in general casual games and just-for-fun stuff sells comparably worse than in the USA, whereas complex huge RPGs of any sort, be it Oblivion, The Witcher, Two Worlds or others, are generally more popular here compared to other games than in the USA.
In the MMO genre, this translates into a few interesting differences. For once, there is often voiced the wish to slow down progression of games. Most message boards and many players in europe, generally speaking, seem more interested in a slower, more epic-feeling journey. Also, the roleplaying hobby is far more widespread in MMORPGs here, and hes led publishers to create more RP-Servers for less players total in europe than in the USA.
In the Free-to-Play Market, I think the major difference is that european customers arent (yet) overly hyped about the word "free". Its not very widespread in advertising, and there is a definitely larger mistrust of anything that supposedly comes for "free", because its not as ingrained in the shopping culture here to see, hunt for, or just hear about freebies given out.
That means, right off the bat, that the major draw of Free-to-Play games lost a lot of pull here. A game like Runes of Magic, for example, will not be compared to other F2P games, but to the usually superior P2P-Games. The 15 Euro or less are not big enough for many here, because apparently the mindset is not as much about getting much bang for your buck, or feeling good for having gained something for free.
On the other side, there is a steadily growing resentment over the fact that in P2P, where european players pay more than US players due to conversion rate and taxation, many games treat their european customers as second-rate, or not at all (Hi WAR!). I believe that is the area where F2P games can edge out a big advantage over current P2P games: Be fair. Treat every customer roughly the same. Dont play favorites.
I'm from Hungary - our market is small, and the gamers here are usually teens or students. That means they usually don't have much money for a P2P game; many teens don't even have a credit card until they are going to the university. So they usually won't pay - rather pirate the games they are playing, or go with one of the F2P games (and now I consider F2P every game which has no monthly fee, including for example Guild Wars). But they still want the same complexity as they want from an offline RPG like Oblivion; the pure grinding is boring.
That's why Runes of Magic can be considered as a success in Hungary: relatively complex, pretty good - and basically it's free, if we don't need many diamonds.
And I have to agree with the last paragraph... if the european players have to pay more (I really hate the 1:1 dollar:euro exchange) and are considered as second rate palyers... they will leave really fast.
Signatures are boring things.
Being Brazilian, I can share some experience on this based on servers being placed here.
I see some MMOs making it into Brazil, but they are ALL F2P and aimed at children: Ragnarok Online, Asda Story, Hello Kitty Online, FLYFF, with very few exceptions like RF Online (a game completely screwed up by their local publisher) and Perfect World
I feel better with a more "global" service like in World of Warcraft or Guild Wars even with ping issues I tend to have a lot more fun. P2P in this case seems to aim for broader services instead of lots of localized servers with, excuse me, below-standard support and quality. But there is the DEVELOPER support, and the following cons do not exist: critical bugs don't take years to be fixed (even when they are about something like DUPING or SERVER CRASHING, the real developers will not have time to deal with it as there are hundreds of other localized versions awaiting support), there are no different patches (your version is 6 patches behind than the French one, that is 2 patches behind the Chinese one that is 1 patch behind the Korean one that is usually the one managed directly by the developers and has the most recent version and is where all the feedback goes into the future patches), you don't see localization flaws, your suggestions actually have developers or direct representatives of developers reading them, issues that can truly destroy a fun game.
Maybe it's part of the F2P genre to provide 1000 low-population servers so that each server has their "top players" that are the ones spending the most cash in their item malls, giving a lot more opportunities for those that wish to be "the best" in their servers, I just feel that breaks my MMO vision, that I find far more appropriate in games like the earlier mentioned Guild Wars (even with the heavy instancing, I can play with anyone anywhere in the world, except for China) and EVE Online (why have different servers if you can have ONE worldwide server only, no matter if there are 1k, 10k or 50k players at peak time).
Something I've noticed is that far more people in Europe are into paying in free to play games than in North America. Micro transactions seem to be preferred in most European countries as a way to pay only when you want, rather than constantly every month.
F2P vs. P2P: I think both have their place, but I think games like guildwars and DDO are (or can be) better F2P models than the typical asian grinder.
On another note...I wish I could take some of the korean devs and mix them with some western devs...some of the asian games have amazing animations and combat manuevers...but end up having a horrible GUI or a boring grindfest.
Many western games, typically P2P, have great concepts, quests etc...but fall flat in the areas that the korean F2P games excel in.
Moving on... I always saw worldwide integration of an MMO as a nightmare scenario. I can't imagine trying to spearhead a group translating the game into multiple languages, plus doing it for every patch/content upgrade that comes out. It sounds like a horrible ulcer coming on.
i am wondering how this was a good article, it doesnt make any sense. It trys to say that we are wrong to say that F2P games are more prevalant in the east then goes on to name 6 korean F2P games as an example. Then goes on to talk about how people choose game shere and in germany which from what the article starts off about has nothing to do with it. The micro transaction MMO market was pratically invented in the eastern market and has been the major staple of all MMOs for over a decade. Its a factual statement that this form of mmo market is pretty much centered there because it Is, and its just recently began to spread out to Europe and the US as a growing market.
Uhm....yeah. That's kind of what I thought when I read this. How can you say f2p isn't bigger in the East? That's pretty much an obvious no brainer to see if you just look at player numbers ALONE. So I guess I don't "get" this article either. /shrug
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
Not sure I read the same article as you.
He said, free to play isn't black and white in the west, as the west is made up of multiple markets and in the case of Europe, free to play games came before subscription games, especially in Eastern Europe. So its not a secondary minor market there, it is infact a massive market in Europe, probably bigger than the subscription market.
I thought the article was prone to a wondering muse myself, but quite a few of Ricahrd’s articles are like that.
It is interesting that pundits like Richard have few facts at their fingertips, I am not having a go at him here, it just shows how much MMO companies keep secret and how much what all the article writers say is pure guess work.
In his summery of the credentials for his eastern contact Mr Spencer Chi he mentions that Aeria has “a community said to number more than six million; this number presumably refers to registered accounts.” You would have thought Mr Chi, the operations manager would have been able to confirm that question regarding registered accounts for his own company wouldn’t you?
This is why I am deeply suspect of statements Richard makes like “Despite the huge and rapidly growing number of people who comprise the free to play audience in the western hemisphere” as a F2P pundit it is in his interest to say this, but the truth here is uncertain as MMO companies play it very close to the chest.
Mr Chi tells us that we all "want quality games for free." No Mr Chi we don’t, we realise that quality costs money. As a first timer a player might well be impressed by a F2P, but once they have played a subsciption MMO they will see the extra quality. Besides once you realise so called ‘free’ 2 play involves needing to buy items from a cash shop you see the exercise in deceitful psychology calling these MMO’s free truly is.
Finally Richard when you said “I'd have to write one every single day for three years to reach a million” I nearly reached for a glass of whiskey and my revolver, god forbid I would have to read one of these every day.
This part struck me as odd:
"In general, American gamers check out the video and decide if they want to download. In Germany, we provide more information such as detailed guides and online tutorials. We've seen that players there prefer to be more informed before deciding whether to download."
I've lived in the US my entire life and I can honestly say I have never downloaded a game simply because of a video. This statement really seemed strange to me.
I always look at all the information available for a certain game before deciding to play it. If that information does not exist, I'll just pass (which is most Eastern F2P games). This mentality really explains a lot about how Eastern-game websites are presented here.
Maybe Mr. Chi is right, maybe I'm the exception to the rule. But I can also say that all of my gamer friends are the same way. For example, one of my friends has not decided if he will play Aion yet because of the lack of information on the crafting system.
If this information was readily available he would have already made his decision one way or the other.
If I had to speculate on why Mr. Chi thinks this way the only explanation I can come up with is perhaps there is more opportunity for English fan-made websites to have information such as detailed guides or tutorials on them than German fan-made websites.
"There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer."
In general though most americans do jsut that, download the game based off a video. Also in the US most games are simplified and made to end quicker. Sometimes I feel I should be living in Europe instead. : )