f13.net

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/10/07/news_6109980.html

This is sad.  Since the game will be designed to appeal to the Asian audience, it probably won't be popular here, even if we ever get to play it here, which doesn't seem likely.

I wonder if the future lies in developing two different games based on the same engine, one for each market?  To a small extent we already have this now where an Asian MMOG might be tuned or patched differently from its NA counterpart; this would simply be one step further.

Bruce

Wow, that is a shame, especially since you know it'll be made for an Asian audience first. More Lineage KekE LALA.

However, perhaps Ubi would allow seperate codebases. They did so with Shadowbane. But somehow, I don't see them thinking there's much M&M market in this country since Heroes's publisher went tits up.

Makes perfect sense to me. The genre is a lot more saturated here than there. While Might & Magic is recognizable, it doesn't have as strong a cache, particularly to a marketing department that probably looked at some hard numbers before making this decision.

I imagine we'll see a few more titles go that way first. More players, less competition, more immediate growth potential. Each passing year will require more innovation to launch an MMORPG in the U.S., and true innovation is expensive to both create, and sell.

This isn't to say it's not worth trying. Just saying it's harder, and that some companies don't like hard.

You're saying Asia has LESS competition than here? I'm not exactly sure of that.

Or they can blend the two into one, a la samurai and ninja in UO.

I was thinking specifically China, and how China has fewer MMORPGs than the U.S. and Europe do. They have plenty of games, but of the massive online variety, they don't seem to have as many (I can think of only a few failed localization attempts, Mu Continent, Exiarch, and perhaps Lineage).

I also separate the Chinese market from the "Far East" market because of the governments and the resultant amount of hoops a dev/publisher must jump through to launch and support a game there.

However, the entire region has always been a blindspot to me, so I eagerly await clarification and correction :)

Luckily, you aren't the only one. I'm probably attributing too much credit to the anecdotal evidence of huge server farms full of Chinese players killing everything in site to Ebay in L2.