World of Warcraft at Ten Ton Hammer

With Hollywood operating a fully-functioning, movie-making machine throughout the two World Wars, it wasn’t until Asian cinema blasted onto movie screens in the 1950s that we saw really poignant non-English cinema. Akira Kurosawa was perhaps the most influential of these Asian film makers, and his films Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress went on to influence a large number of film makers. However, Asian cinema still hasn’t caught up to Hollywood in terms of overall, international popularity, and may never surpass the Los Angeles juggernaut.

However, the scenario is different when it comes to video games. Nintendo and Sony – and Sega for many years – have held a tight-fisted grip on the video game world… but not so with MMOs. Remarkably, MMO design and development has remained a very segregated sphere with very little crossover success occurring. Still, the MMO industry is beginning to feel the influence of our Asian allies quite significantly, and the buzz around this fall’s upcoming release of Aion only proves this point.

The question still remains: Will Asian MMOs ever succeed where their film brethren have failed? I went to our experts to find out. Again, the answers were mixed and divisive along several lines of thought. Rather than preface their thoughts in any way, I’ll just give you the ideas of the men, straight from their mouths.

Rich Waters:

There’s lots of innovation in Asia, with hundreds of smaller games trying all sorts of wacky ideas.  Western and Asian players are not tied to the same type of gaming, features, or even cultural stories much of the time, so taking the same game to both markets can be tricky.  We localized EverQuest to Asia, for instance, and found that a lot of things we took for granted weren’t valued by the Asian player – extensive character customization, for instance, just wasn’t a priority for them.  There were enough differences between Asian and Western games that we ended up opening a local office in Taiwan, so we could rely on local talent to help us make games that have a higher appeal in Asia.

Hermann Peterscheck:

Who knows? I mean on both sides of the pacific you have these giant entities that are desperate to find success in the opposite market. The giant Chinese and Korean publishers are just as excited to capture the US and European market as the US publishers are to capture Asia. With very few exceptions, they have been unable to do that and there are millions of dollars and thousands of man hours dedicated to figuring out why that might be which goes to show you how hard it is to know why.

I think people really get hung up on things like billing models and cultural specifics. The one major Asian/US/European success - World of Warcraft - I don't find particularly culturally sensitive, nor did they massage their billing model; so it's hard to see those two things. One thing I will say about WoW is that it is conspicuously culturally neutral. For example, if you look at their herbalism tree, they made up all new herbs. Herbs are one area where West and East have very particular expectations and if you have things like Garlic and Mandrake you could, perhaps, alienate your Asian audience, whereas no one knows what Peacebloom is. That's all just guesswork though. The truth is no one knows why WoW was so successful in all kinds of markets and anyone who does know should just go ahead and duplicate that success.

Craig Alexander:

First of all, Turbine is paying a lot of attention to what’s going on in Asia, especially in terms of business models. The free-to-play model was pioneered to great success in the Asian marketplace, and some of that was simply because of necessity over there. For a variety of reasons, retail gaming for the PC never took off, and so necessity turned into a business model implementation that worked.

We’re trying to match that success over here, and we believe that consumer behavior is generally the same across the world. I think we’ll be successful with it.

As far as content goes, you’re correct. The Asian films have had a limited amount of success in North America, and the challenge of bringing Asian content to North America has been difficult. There are very few examples of Chinese and Korean games coming successfully to the United States, but there have been a few. Most of the success in video games obviously has come from Japan.

I’m not convinced it won’t happen, but it just hasn’t happened in a big way yet. There are definitely big segments of the population that are huge anime fans and that sort of thing. It’s just when those games go up against entertainment that is a little more familiar, they tend to choose that over the international content.

The same problem definitely occurs in the reverse, and it’s getting tougher and tougher to get Western content into the Asian markets. The companies in that area of the world are just getting better and better at developing the content in their home countries.

Steve Preeg:

That’s a tough question. I think it’s a little bit easier to transcend that boundary in games because film has so much more real world culture behind it. The game is more about the experience of the play versus cultural information that’s being shown in a movie.

At the same time, a lot of the foreign games that I have played are just really odd. The Asian culture is definitely there in some games, and I’m not sure if the American culture slips into it quite as much. That said, if they made something and it was marketed well, I certainly think it can succeed. I mean, I don’t doubt their design or creativity.