The Three Cs of GDC 08: Casuals, Children, and Coreans
I had the opportunity to sit down and speak with all of them, and, I fear I may have annoyed them greatly by asking only a handful of questions about their games themselves, and spending the rest of the time focusing on what I thought was the real key issue:
“What are you going to do to convince people that a title from Korea is worth playing, considering the tarnished reputations they have in many people’s minds?”
Largely, their answers revolved around a commitment to quality, polish, and localization (in other words, a lack of Engrish and grind) above and beyond those of their competition.
Except for Nexon.
Nexon’s response was, if I recall, “We hate those games! They really give us a bad name!”
And Nexon, if anyone, has a right to be bitter. Of all the companies attempting to introduce East Asian titles into the North American market, they are one of the few unambiguous stories of success. By some counts, MapleStory is the number two online game in the United States, after WoW.
And, one of the primary reasons behind this, I think, is that MapleStory, and their other popular title, Kart Rider, primarily appeal to younger teenagers. In other words, people playing their first MMO.
During GDC I stayed at the house of a good friend of mine. She has a fifteen year old daughter, who plays MapleStory. All of her friends play along with her.
She doesn’t think of Nexon as “That company from Korea,” she thinks of them as “The guys who make MapleStory.”
By getting to players while they’re young and inexperienced, Nexon seems to have sidestepped the stigma associated with Eastern games, and were given the ability to stand on their own merits.
But, whether or not these teenagers will grow up to develop a taste for Eastern games, whether from playing MapleStory, Ragnarok Online, or any other title, remains an open question.
The cultural differences between Eastern and Western gamers are vast, as are their playing styles. What people want out of a game from one country to the next is very often not mutual.
And, this is not just a one-way street. American companies attempting to introduce Western MMOs in Asia have fallen flat just as heavily there as Asian companies have here.
I’m sure that right now in Seoul there’s a Korean reporter banging away on his keyboard, complaining about the sub-par quality of the American games attempting to shoehorn their way into his country.
WoW has been the only real American success story in Asia, and, considering the fact that Starcraft was already just about the national sport of several countries there, I’d say that Blizzard had just a slight advantage going in.
The Fourth C of GDC: Conclusions
I met a great number of a lot of people involved in the genre at GDC this year. If they were any indication at all, the future of the MMOs is a bright one.
Let me say, it makes the job of being a jaded cynic that much harder when I find out that the people on the other end of the titles I busy myself lambasting are thoughtful, intelligent, and every bit as passionate about creating great games as I would be were our positions reversed.
Some times, reality just doesn’t measure up to expectations. Or, the money runs out, and things don’t work out as well as they would have liked. Should anyone really be criticized for that?
For now, of course, the answer will have to remain yes. All that I can really do here as a writer and a journalist is to continue to ask the tough questions, and cover games with a veteran’s shrewd eye.
In doing so, I can only hope that as one of the lone voices shouting bitter curses and hurling rocks from the back rows of the gaming press to, in some small way, make them better.
Even shame, after all, can be a very powerful motivator.
