When Western MMOs go East
Gamasutra is featuring an insightful piece on the challenges and pitfalls of Western game developers looking to move their games to the extremely productive Eastern gaming markets. China, Japan, and especially Korea are world-renowned for their appreciation of videogames, and recent years have seen a number of Eastern games make the move to Europe and the US with varying degrees of success. According to article author Tim Allison, a key to addressing new marketplaces is to not only localize content and design but business models as well.
Allison runs through a number of points in this space, covering issues like console success in the region, the almost mandatory nature of online distribution, and the always-thorny issue of monetization. Possibly most interesting is the author's statement that the Korean marketplace "made" the MMO genre. "The South Korean government, both through its late 1990s subsidies for game development and rollout of the broadband network, became the key driver of this segment. Even in 2008 where overall the Korean MMOG content is not up to its usual high standard the Korean companies are still setting the industry terms."
