East Versus West

Gaming companies know there are at least 2 major markets for Massively Multiplayer Online gaming. You've got the Western market dominated by Everquest in past years and World of Warcraft more recently while the Eastern or Pan-Asian market looking more anime-ish with titles like Legend of Mir II and Lineage II.

While shooter games like cCounterstrike and strategy titles like Warcraft 3 have proven popular regardless of language or ethnicity, the realm of MMO's show a sharp divide of tastes and philosophies between the 2 major markets.

Western gamers tend to log in from home and bear the label of gaming geek. Eastern gamers are regular folks who trek to huge gaming cafes for their MMO fix and tend to include the popular kids too. Costs in the Western countries are also higher with a tendency to make payments by credit card. Around here, cheap prepaid is the way to go.

This divide has led to some fairly spectacular failures in MMO launches; sharp lessons to international game publishers looking to establish solid user bases in areas outside their home country.

Invisible Borders
The fantasy MMO Final Fantasy XI would be a good case of point. This game was a big success in Japan but got a lukewarm from reviewers and players in the United States. Our own Ragnarok Online that was a moderate success in Asia and become king-of-the-hill for the longest time here managed to get clobbered when it tried to penetrate the UU. And this was even with decent reviews backing it up.

On the sci-fi end of things, EVE Online and Star Wars: Galaxies aren't even blips on the MMO radar here in Asia. And this is pretty sad as both games are incredibly rich and immersive experiences with mature online cultures that offer more than endless hacking through mobs of monsters.

It's like there's an invisible border between the Western gaming market and Asia. Not too many MMO games can successfully cross this border though there have been notable exceptions.

Blizzard's World of Warcraft is the unbeatable juggernaut for MMO's these days and it seems that around half of all its players are in China. We even have groups of dedicated players here despite having to get the game from outside and playing on foreign servers.

Common GroundWhile it would stand to reason that each country would have its own tastes in gaming, the Philippine gaming setting is a unique mix in the region. Prior to Level-Up's entry and launch of Ragnarok Online, our gaming culture was limited to playing at home and some cafes that had computers strong enough to handle decent games. We had some exposure to Japanese games but the preference was strongly Western due to language barriers.

Ragnarok Online changed all that as we Pinoys finally had access to Korean content that we could understand. Since then, the inevitable domino effect has led the Philippines to become a major market for Asian gaming and a testing ground for new international publishers trying to develop new gaming markets.

Our solid preference for English games makes us ideal for English localizations of various Chinese, Japanese and Korean games. Originally, these localizations are expensive as they're done for US and some Euroean markets with attendant translation costs. Our own Pinoy game translator costs less and the newly localized game can immediately make money in a market that's proven traditionally friendly to Asian MMO's.

As it stands, the Philippines sits squarely between 2 major philosophies of MMO gaming and takes the best from both. We love the level grinding in World of Warcraft and can still meet up with friends for a number of games for an hour or two of Ragnarok, RAN or whichever suits the barkada's fancy. We already enjoy gatekeeper status for a number of games attempting to cross the invisible border. If more gaming companies could see the potential of the Philippines as a testing ground, there would be fewer localization failures for MMO's. Now if only the Western game publishers would realize that.


By Badong G. Reyes
For The REC Room of Cebu Daily News
02-April-2007 page 18