f13.net

So I just heard from one of my students who works with the SK Network company that the Blizzard CEO is planning to visit Korea soon and discuss some issues concerning WOW in Korea.  Apparently they still have some concerns about how well WOW is working for Korean customers and want to address those concerns directly with their Korean counterparts.

Couldn't get too much info because it was just something he heard about, as he does not directly work in that division of the company.

Just FYI.

Also, when the network company surveys their customers, they give them some Cyworld credit for filling out the survey as an incentive.  Interesting concept.

I imagine that he's going to have to beat the adoring fans back with a stick.  If he bends that way though the trip should do wonders for his sex life.

Oh, definitely.

On the other hand, I had to explain to one of my female students recently that Blizzard is NOT a Japanese company!

He's going to get zerg rushed and eaten by people who want to obtain his power.

How to sell WoW to Koreans: "Free Starcraft 2 beta key in every box!"

To be fair, they don't really even have to lie. Just included a copy of Starcraft 1 in every box, and they'll sell like, 93279357853685gdyue5 copies per person.

WoW in S. Korea still has not broken a million subscribers AFAIK which has to be considered a failure given their other successes there and how well WoW is doing in the other parts of the world where it has been released.

WoW isn't "hard" enough. Hello? Remember how Korea has complete shit for taste in gaming?

My guess is that grind is not long enough and not repetitive enough for Korean tastes. Also PvP too shallow and not punishing enough.

How to fix WoW for Koreans:

1) Slow down exp gain by magnitude of 5
2) Require reputation to do any kind of trade with NPCs and make repetitive turn in quests the only way to gain rep. You shouldn't be able to even buy food or drinks without reputations. Basically make every city furbog-equivalent.
3) Add exp loss to PvP death and weaken/eliminate NPC guards

...maybe SoE needs to release Vanguard in Korea, quicksmart like!

As I've said elsewhere, there's no particularly Korean affectation to grinding.

Why hasn't WoW sold better in Korea? Well, American MMOs in general don't do well in Korea. A lot of it is because they're... uh... not Asian. Sounds painfully obvious, doesn't it? And by Asian I don't mean "rang rang, grindalicious because we're hardcore", I mean more in terms of aesthetic and gameplay elements. WoW is designed to be solo-friendly which isn't an issue with most Korean players who play MMOs in groups.

The Korean MMO market is *very* competitive, and WoW is in the running, it's just not the overwhelmingly dominant market leader that it is elsewhere in the world. Neither is Google. In Korea Google is an also ran to locally-run search engines.

To back up my statement I should've mentioned that Blizzard announced in March 2005 that NA, Europe, and Korea had all broken 500K subscribers (NA was closer to 800K at that point) so that was the first and as far as I can tell the only specific subscribers number they've given for Korea. Fast forward to Jan 2007, Blizzard announces they've broken 8 million with the following specific numbers: 2 mill+ NA, 1.5 mill+ Europe, 3.5 mill+ in China. Add that up and you get over 7 million subscribers which means Taiwan, Singapore and Korea have to account for the remaining 1 million implying that Korea is still stuck at around 500K subscribers.

I don't buy the "it's not Asian enough" argument. That would imply that WoW should not have done as well as it has in China unless you are arguing that China somehow is somehow much more "Westernized" than S. Korea is. That also does not explain why Guild Wars completely tanked in S. Korea. That game does have a decidedly Asian look to it and it has the team-based PvP that the Koreans love so much.

Sounds more like Korea is a place where 'made in Korea' buys you more credit than Made in Wherever does in the west.

Which of course explains why StarCraft is like a national obsession over there. No wait it doesn't.

Well, bearing in mind that SC2 is (probably) in development and there's a 50/50 chance of it being announced at Blizzcon this year - the other possibility being Diablo 3 which is also (probably) in development - promising SC2 beta keys might not be a lie.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9861.0

Errr... someone den the other topic or something, I missed that one :(

Nah that's okay -- it's a separate topic.

CEO kinda lends credit to the SC2 announcement.

Ugh, Starcraft 2.

That's if he happens to be there at the tournament. Xerapis didn't give a date to his rumor.

The Chinese market is different from the Korean market; there's not much of a comparison. China hasn't had a great deal of domestic MMOs produced until recently; mostly they import them from Korea (and now WoW) and run them locally.

Also, while GW has an "Asian" look, it's not Asian. There's a difference, as I've been lectured on. It's like when Japanese console games try to depict the US as a land of cowboys and gangsters.

And yes, "Made in Korea" is HUGE in Korea. It's spooky walking around Seoul and literally seeing no cars but Hyundais and Daewoos.

I really never understood SK's huge obsession with SC...I've never been that crazy about the game. There are certainly other, perhaps better, RTS games.

When I lived there, the almost total lack of foreign cars was generally explained as being due to the 100% import tariff on vehicles.  That was 20+ years ago, though, couldn't say if it's still in place.

Gas prices at around $1/liter couldn't have helped either.

You loose your green text button or do we need to buy you and sinji a set of "I'm with Stupid" shirts?  This rangrang grindygrindy kekeke shit is so assbackwards...

Still doesn't explain why StarCraft is so popular over there and WoW is not (relatively speaking).

They're.... completely different games and genres? Thought we were talking about MMOs. Why is Counterstrike so popular in the US? Why is Europe nuts for cell phones? Why does Russia have cold winters? ANSWER ME!

I mean, by your logic, since Starcraft is so popular, Koreans should love MMOs with no character development save what buildings you construct.

That's fine if the difference is because of the genres, though I don't think that's the reason since MMOs are so popular over there. What I'm taking issue with is your blanket statement that WoW isn't (as) successful over there because it's not Asian enough.

I have long assumed WoW isn't as popular over there for two main reasons:

• It's not socially competitive enough. Battlegrounds resolve too fast and have clear win conditions that reward in only one thing: points for better gear for character personalization in a static unchanging environment. SC2 meanwhile is not only a different genre, but a fundamentally different depth of competition altogether. User bring a LOT of themselves to that game. With WoW BGs, you bring what you grinded before hand and only get what you can grind after. Maybe Arena battles will change this.
  
• It's too one-dimensional in general. This is the land where literally tens of millions of people have played Krazykart, Audition, Pangya and Maplestory. Only the last one of those is anything approaching a DIKU.
  
  

I never thought the theming would be much of a challenge, but perhaps it is because Eastern "fantasy" and Western "fantasy" are just so very dfferent.

Yeah, I'm not so sure about that "Asian-ness" thing either. We're talking about a slightly Asian-themed look to what's basically a bog-standard high-fantasy setting. That's pretty much nothing like depicting America as the land of cowboys, gangsters and gangstas.

It's probably pretty straight forward.  You know how even when Asian games try to do 'tough' they end up with some androgynous looking thing from a Calvin Klein ad?  I'm sure that when we try and do Asian styles they see the same sort of thing, "Boy those American characters sure are fugly!", ya know?

You guys do remember the leather dom/sub suit from low level FFXI right?

Different tastes.

Yeah, that I can see. Like the whole "band-aid on the face" thing means "tough" rather than "goofy". But comparing Asian and Western-style high fantasy is a world away from comparison-wise to showing all Americans as Cowboys and all asians as Japanese Schoolgirls in stripper-short skirts.

Was that an underhanded jab at Nelly or something?

Also are me and Margalis the only people who think FFXI looked like a hundred times better then any other MMO when it came out?

As I understand it basically comes down to timing. SC came out just as Internet cafes (or whatever they call them over there) were getting really popular in Korea. It was Highly competitive fast paced and Fun. And being at the time probably one of the few and most likely the best game in town it spread like wildfire. And everyone knows how much you love your first MMO/RPG/RTS/Whatever above all others. (AgeofEmpires myself)

As for WoW. Like other people have said by the time it came out, what? 8+ years later. There were endless options for MMOs in Korea all with large DEVOTED fan bases, AKA it was not released in a near vacuum. That plus it being a western game, and I'm sure lots of other small factors (lack of very competitive game play) has hindered it's growth.

I didn't say it looked bad.  I said they were different main stream tastes.

If you want to big numbers you have to cater to the main stream.

I loved the look.  Couldn't stand getting my bum handed to me by lower level mobs at level ten.

The environments were the best I had seen at the time.  I loved how the little cliffs and mountain edges looked handcrafted, not procedural.  Once I got past the pixelation, it was a beautiful looking game.  Great character/monster animations too, just not the best looking models.

Install?  Worst ever.

Gameplay?  Meh.

No you aren't the only one.

I was stunned when I saw the footprints appearing in the wet sand or when it was raining. If you manually turn anti-aliasing on, FFXI still stands up as one of the nicer looking games.

Yes, worst installation ever. Gotta be somewhere up their with Horizons for worst treatment of customers as well and without the excuse of incompetence.

That's the response the Crecente got when he contacted Blizzard about the SC2 buzz.

So, it's not SC2. What is it then? It's gotta be big if the head honcho is coming down.

(Yes, I know I posted this in another thread as well, but I figured this information would help both threads)

Let's translate that from PR into english:
"At present" = "at the exact time when this statement was issued"
"At present" <> "May 19th" ;)

I'd say Diablo except this announcement is being tied to a Korean-based event. Not sure if that IP means anything to them, so maybe it's something more from the Sierra Online side, some sort of game aggregation service wrapped with community stuff like persistent world game lobbies, avatars, etc?

Except that Sierra Entertainment has nothing to do with Blizzard anymore. I.e. both are part of Vivendi Games rather than Blizzard being part of Sierra as it was once in its history so it would very odd for Paul Sams to be announcing a Sierra Entertainment product.

On a related note it would be very odd for Paul Sams to be making a new game announcement rather than Mike Morhaime.

Exactly. This could be a case of big company divisional politics for all we know. We'll find out on the 18th.

Actually, Diablo II is quite popular here as well.

It's just completely overshadowed by Starcraft, that's all.

Wait, I think I missed something.  Is the CEO of Blizzard going to Korea for something specific? 

In my world CEO's go to Korea all the time for meetings and business deals.  Maybe I'm hard to impress, but if the CEO of Google (or any other company) went to Korea, nobody would be very excited.

Unless there's some press announcements expected, save the excitement for someone going to North Korea.  Now THAT would be interesting.

Meanwhile: Wow isn't conducive to game room atmosphere for a variety of reasons.  I've been to Korea, my inlaws are Korean, and I have read about/visited game rooms.  However, for me to list those reasons would be armchair marketing though, so I can only guess at the real hows and whys.

 

I honestly don't know about the Korean MMO market, so please educate me on this one.  Grindtastic EQ was popular in the West until WoW, a legitimate less-grindy alternative, was released and utterly obliterated EQ.  Super-uptra-grindtastic Lineage was popular in Korea, Super-ultra-grindtastic Lineage 2 was popular in Korea.....and both still are.  So it's not insane to think that the Korean market favors grindy MMOs, or at least has a much higher tolerance for them.  Is there some Lineage-level-popular non-grindy MMO in Korea I don't know about?

Now, I certainly don't buy the borderline (and not so borderline) racist explanations behind/slurs describing this phenomenon, but it seems real enough to me.  Perhaps playing in a cafe with other people lends itself to group-centered gameplay in long, contiguous chunks?  That seems plausible to me.  WoW does a shitty job of that, at least during the 1-70 game.  So would any MMO that people on this board would say isn't a mind-numbing grindfest since saying "I like games demanding group-centered gameplay in long, contiguous chunks" around here will get you about the same reaction as saying "Bush is the greatest President evar" or "We should bring back Bruce."

Like I said, I don't know much about the market, so I may be missing something(s) obvious to those who do.

Again: same culture that enjoyed the Lineages ALSO liked (by a way-fucking-lot): Krazykart Racer (kustom kart kracing), Audition (DDR), Maplestory (grind-tastic diku), and Pangyea (mini-golf). It's not about catering to the hardcore. They are merely a PART of the culture, just as they are here when a game like GTA sells rings about WoW, which by comparison to that is a contrived grind on rails to the average video gamer.

To look at global MMOs is to look at culture AND within the genre AND outside of the genre.

No, I thought it looked stupid back when Ryu wore one in SSF2TX or whatever the hell it was. Nelly looks like a fuckwit, regardless of the "story" he has behind the band-aid on his face. No underhanded needed. :p

And yes, I never played it, but a friend did play FF and I thought it looked very nice compared to EQ at the time.

I thought FFXI looked good when it launched, but that godawful UI is what really turned me off, even using the Logitech keyboard that combined the PS2 controller with a full keyboard. I'm predisposed to dislike MMOs on anything less than a 16:9 high-def console for looks alone, but also because of what I think is a gimped control system for a still text-based game. This is why I'm so interested in AoC. That game is looking to be more console-y by default, which means a top-down integrated and consistent UI (at least from what I've played/seen at shows).

FFXI felt like a PC experience forced onto a console and then ported back to a PC.