The Three Cs of GDC 08: Casuals, Children, and Coreans
Sensing an opportunity to tackle an actual serious, journalistic topic (as opposed to the usual “How awesome is your game?”), I inquired of one of the PR people seated across the table if they knew of anyone who would be interested in doing an interview on the implications of marketing an MMO to children.
Staci Krause, Editor for the Vault Network, was sitting directly to my right and overheard the question. She didn’t seem to think that there were any particular implications at all.
She was a mother herself, she said, and saw nothing wrong with her own children playing ToonTown Online.
I asked, “Do you really think that we should be getting kids involved in what is arguably a very addictive genre?”
Both Staci and the PR person seemed to take issue with this, and replied that they didn’t think that MMOs were, on the whole, all that addictive. Sure, there were addictive personalities who played MMOs, but they were the exception, not the rule.
That signaled my turn to take issue. Do not ever let anyone tell you that MMOs are not addictive.
I was once the leader of a high-end raiding guild on a very competitive server. I have seen the face of MMO addiction first-hand. It is the face of a 22 year old man failing all of his classes and dropping out of college, because he spent fourteen hours a day raiding, grinding for items or reputation, or gathering materials to gain access to a raid due to a “four pot minimum.”
Granted, I and the other officers of the guild were as guilty as the game itself for enabling his behavior, but, even if we removed him from the guild in an attempt to foster his studies he would have joined another and been back to the grind within hours. Such is the power that these titles can hold over people.
Should a nine-year-old child really have to deal with that?
I had the opportunity to broach this subject the next day when I came across the second instance, and interviewed Per Rosendal, CEO of Guppyworks, a Denmark-based company specializing in children’s games. Their current project is Guppylife, billed as an MMO for young girls. That interview will be linked here when it is published.
The third C of GDC, was for Coreans.
(And, for those of you unaware of the whole conspiracy theory, you can feel free to brush up on the Corea-Korea controversy right over here.)
Korean games were out in force at the con this year, with nearly every other demo or interview on my schedule being for a title coming out of East Asia.
Eastern titles trying to make inroads into the American market are, of course, nothing new. But, until the past few years they’ve always existed on the periphery of the genre, inhabiting a sort of gaming no-mans-land. A place where most players ventured only if they were unemployed teenagers, looking for a time-killer in between games, or, for one reason or another, just felt that titles from American developers didn’t offer enough grind.
I attended a panel during the Worlds in Motion Summit which focused extensively on this subject, entitled “Is Asia the New Hollywood? Ideas from the East.”
The consensus among the panelists was that Korea represents the world’s first “mature market” in the MMO genre. The saturation point has long since been reached, and everyone who is going to play an MMO is already playing one. The only Koreans left to be marketed to now are the unborn, and the dead.
Which means, that companies there seeking to expand their bottom lines need to look elsewhere for new market share, such as in the emerging online spaces of China, Vietnam, Eastern Europe… and, of course, North America.
Back at E for All I came across the first such of these companies, K2 Network, and at GDC I met three more: Nexon, Gravity/L5 Games, and OGPlanet.
