Nexon America’s Min Kim: Bridging the East-West Divide, and Aiming for a Younger Demographic

By Steven Crews | October 7, 2009 | | Filed under: Features, Interviews

The MMO Gamer: Shifting gears a bit. One of the major subject that I wanted to get into with you today, is the differences between Eastern MMO players and Western MMO players.

Everyone has their own theories on it, and I’d like to see if we can build some sort of a consensus.

So, in your personal opinion, why is there seem to be this great gulf of game popularity in the different countries? Lineage, for example, is a multi-billion dollar industry in Korea, while hardly anyone plays it in North America.

And aside from WoW, the same could be said of just about any Western MMO trying to get into the East.

Min Kim: I don’t really have a good answer for that. I’m not positive that there is a difference. What would you think are the clear differences between a Western player and an Eastern Player? Or what do you think people think are the differences?

The MMO Gamer: Well, I am only going on hearsay because I’ve never actually been to Korea and seen this myself. But I’ve heard that at its core it’s an entirely different player culture there, a different play style.

People play primarily in LAN cafes. They are all in the same room together, it’s a very social experience. While people in the West tend to play at home, by themselves…

Min Kim: I would definitely say that it is a very social experience over there, where you are playing in LAN cafes and stuff.

But if that were available in the states, I think people would do that too. Especially if I think about when I was in college or the dorms if I go back to my college just to visit some of my fraternity brothers, they’re playing in the same way that people play in Asian LAN cafes but that’s not available over here.

That’s actually one of the toughest things about doing business here, is that LAN cafes don’t exist. Because they are hotbeds for marketing your game, as well as for people to kind of act as a hands-on tutorial, where they show people how to play games.

I honestly think that the reason why certain games are successful over there and not successful over here and vice versa, has to do with the service element of the games.

If you look at Lineage over there, Ncsoft is a huge company in Korea and they service the games to an extremely high quality over there, but they probably don’t do that on this side of the ocean.

In the same way, when people take games in the West, and bring them over to Asia, they are going through a publishing relationship, they are not necessarily servicing the games in the best way, and that’s probably where you get a big disconnect is that, a game like World of Warcraft, well, not World of Warcraft, a game like Lineage in Korea, probably doesn’t feel like Lineage in the states.

It might not necessarily be all about how players play, but how you service the game.

The MMO Gamer: Interesting point. And going back to your question about the differences, one of the other arguments I’ve have heard is the tolerance for, I guess you could call it the grinding style of gameplay…

Min Kim: The grind, yeah.

The MMO Gamer: …is much higher in Asia than it is in the West. People here won’t stand for it.

Min Kim: I think people still do grind here, and I think people in Asia don’t prefer the grind, in general. Nobody likes grinding.

It’s just a kind of an accepted way to play in some cases, but a lot of developers are trying to get away from that.

Much of it has to do with development times, and not being able to generate contents fast enough for people to enjoy. Like you said, if you are a hardcore gamer if you are playing 40 hours a week, or even 40 hours a month, you are going to exhaust the content.

So the grind is the cheap way to basically get players to constantly be playing. I honestly hear people from Asia complaining about it all the time. But, they’ll do that, because certain items only drop through grinding, and you’re basically going to have to kill 10,000 of this one thing to get a chance of having this item. I think that’s why they grind, that ultimate end goal of trying to get something.

But I don’t like grinding, and I don’t think anyone does.

The MMO Gamer: So Eastern and Western gamers are closer than most people think, it’s simply a difference in design philosophy and support structure, in your opinion?

Min Kim: Yeah, I think so. Maybe there might be a difference in competitive gaming, meaning people in Asia might like PvP more. But I think that is not necessarily indicative of the player, but just the evolution of how people are playing.

Here in the West, maybe they’re starting to play more co-op, etc, and they might get into more PvP as that develops, or people develop their gaming styles and habits.

Mike Crouch [Nexon PR]: There was that moratorium on consoles coming from Japan into Korea that was lifted a few years back. Do you think that really shaped the Korean gaming market?

Min Kim: That’s a good point. There’s a couple things that I have theories about regarding the Korean gaming market. The Asian gaming market started with arcades, and that’s the same in the States. It started with arcades, extremely social, and then what ended up happening was consoles started taking over, where you’re playing with your house, or you’re going over to your friend’s house, etc.

In Korea there was a moratorium on consoles or Japanese products coming in, so you weren’t able to get these consoles unless you were buying them gray market. On top of that, in Korea you don’t really invite friends over to your house. Your parents don’t like that, it’s actually a faux pas to invite yourself over, or have lots of friends over to your house.

So what people ended up doing, first they went to the arcades, and then they went to these net cafes where they were having these LAN parties.

Also, there was a big focus on education, and people just didn’t like, parents didn’t like kids playing games. So you just wouldn’t do that at home. I think that actually forced the market to speed up into a very social gaming environment.

On top of that, PC games just weren’t able to survive because people were just copying the shit out of them, and that basically killed that market.

Mike Crouch: As for the grinding, because of the way Min talked about, that it’s a cheap easy way for developers to not build content, so that they can just keep expanding the grind, it’s kind of created its own culture within gaming.

Which is to say that it’s been there, it’s been part of gaming for so long in Asia, that it’s become an accepted part, and like a badge of honor to go through those 20 levels of grind in Lineage. Even though nobody likes it, but still…

Min Kim: There’s other ways to play the game. You can play the game and do all sorts of different kinds of things, but your quickest path to leveling up some times is grinding, and doing something very boring.

People just want the shortest path to level up and get the stuff that they want.

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