Peering into China
A sample of a report (PDF) on the Chinese market for online gaming was released a few days ago, and I just found it via the fascinating Virtual China blog.
Among the key statements in the report:
- $900m in revenues predicted in 2006
- There are over 160 games being operated in total; 83 operators and 153 games being operated locally.
- Locally developed games are taking the lead (exceptions being WoW and O2Jam, a game I think I have mentioned before)
- Broadband can now be had for $10/month in most cities, causing a shift away from net cafes and towards home play.
- The free-play, item sales model is limited to less popular or aging games; the classic business model is the most likely to continue to dominate, because the free play model has lower stickiness and revenue.
- 39.6m online gamers, though a huge number of them are playing free casual games.
- This represents 33.2% of the Chinese Internet audience.
- But the paying audience for games in the current market is likely capped. Future growth will come from new Internet users and females.
- Chinese developers, because of the emphasis on lower-tech, simpler games, can produce an MMORPG for as little as 10m yuan (which is only around $1.25m — literally somewhere between 1/10th and 1/100th of the cost in the Western markets).
- But most of the games suck.
- This has caused rapid turnover even among hits — a game will reach 100,000 peak concurrent, then fade, but be replaced in a relatively short time.
- So there is now an actual strategy of infrequent A games and B-caliber “filler” games that are expected to peak and churn.
- The B games are also the “fallback” games: as soon as the A game starts charging, players retreat back to the free games.
- The B games often have regional followings, because local governments provide support, and because of local marketing incentives.
- The Warcraft RTSes trained Chinese players in Western mythology.
- Western MMOGs have too many roleplaying elements and not enough hack ‘n’ slash for the Chinese market.
- Because of the cafe infrastructure that trained gamers in China, they are used to not having save games. Cafes would wipe the save games off their machines, and often would not even install all the missions in a campaign. The result is a strong session-based mentality that carries over into the quick-reward play of hack n slash games. This also means that there is no significant RPG segment in China.
- This is a big part of WoW’s popularity in China: you can play it like Diablo.
- There is no large untapped FPS/RTS market than can be tapped to convert to online games — they already converted, that’s who’s playing now.
- WoW has hit a half million concurrent, but there’s literally dozens of games that break 100,000 concurrent, and the top game has hit over 700,000 concurrent.
Wait, with a few exceptions western MMOGs are ALL hack ‘n’ slash. I don’t understand… do the Chinese just want endless waves of enemies to come at their characters, with no healing and no travel from place to place?
Awesome info. I’ll check it out.
Do their market figures for revenues include ad revenues around the free online casual games? That’s a pretty significant segment, so if they don’t include it, the market’s actually bigger (end users paying with time that is converted into advertiser dollars)
You need to try a few of the Asian games. 🙂 They’re much more direct about it. You start your character, walk out of town, and find a field of shambling monsters. Then you start clicking.
Kim, maybe the full report does, but I only read the free sample. Maybe you can spend some of your MS budget on it. 😉
The author seems somewhat confused as to what the word roleplay means. From my (limited) research in the field the chinese players dont mind roleplaying, but their mmorpg’s dont worry alot about story and lore.
Wait.. how is this different from western MMPs? 😉
In western MMPs, you start out clicking in a field of rabbits or wolf pups. You don’t get to see any shambling monsters until you’ve played for at least half an hour.
I spoke with a Chinease young man getting his EE degree at my school – by chance about a month ago – he suggested that the biggest barrier for an MMO to be succesful in the Chinease market is the language/interface localization issues. I think a big reason WoW is so succesful over there is that its interface is almost entirely logographic and icon-based, and chat threads are server-based, so Mandarin character sting adjustment can be treated unilaterally. Of course, the nature of the interaface ties in to the Diablo-esque gameplay, but notice that the more complex games like Eve and Second Life haven’t caught on there. This isn’t because the Chinease don’t like social gameplay, but because the langauge/interface barrier is too steep for them to interact meaningfully with worlds hinging on player co-operation. Linden and whatever company runs Eve could probably open servers for the Chinease market, but in Second Life’s case it’d require a whole new content community, and I’m not sure if Eve is one cohesive platform or server distributed like WoW. In the prior case that would mean tackling the real-time translation problem so Chinease players could usefully collaborate with foriegners.