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MMOs from China
SereneBlue
Member Posts: 32
Found this really interesting talk by a guy who is the CEO of one of the 3 MMOs I currently play (Crystal Saga).
Thought I might share it as it is an interesting look at a few differences between MMO markets in China compared to Europe and N. America.
Comments
Here is a quote from one guy who was familiar with the Chinese MMO market (commenting on the video talk):
***********
Despite the 97% failure rate of products in China, the one thing they do really well there is that they build their games around their monetization design, and the game design is secondary. Every game there has a monetization tech working on it, and in some cases they have one for every *server*. Here in the West if we consider monetization at all it usually means applying analytics to games after they are designed and we totally lose the opportunity to design our games to monetize. If the West could take monetization design more seriously, or if the quality of game design in the East could improve, some truly amazing (and profitable) games could be the result.
If you want to know why a company would need to open up 224 servers per week, this is explained in detail in my "How 'Pay to Win' Works" paper: http://gameful.org/group/games-for-change/forum/topics/how-pay-to-win-works
The information for this paper was mostly gathered from playing Chinese browser games, some of which I was the top player on all servers while researching (for those that think I only understand Western markets). This was on a $20 per server budget.
As Jared points out, games in China are so cheap, and so quickly copied, that the emphasis is on very fast ROI. There is no emphasis on player retention and thus their use of monetization models that reduce product lifespan are not a problem. Companies in the West that use similar techniques and then lose most of their players in the first month should not be surprised.
The idea of guild levels is great and I have been trying to pitch this to a lot of Western companies, but the idea seems very alien to players who have not played Chinese games. The monetization potential here is massive.
I think the best take-away I can suggest on this excellent presentation is that Western game design is more advanced, Eastern monetization design is more advanced, and the most successful products will be future hybridized products. Trying to take the game design from one continent and the monetization design from another continent and just slapping them together will not work. Both need to be modified for effective hybridization.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Yeah from my consumer point of view it looks totally awful. Though I see that some smaller f2p western companies are picking it up.
Guild lvls isnt chinese. Guild lvls are older then WoW. They have been in Korean mmos as old as Ragnarok Online. The Chinese just copy the koreans when it comes to mmos just like the Chinese copy americans in everything else.