SINGAPORE -- "Online games can change the world." Games should be considered as one of the "lively arts" of the 21st century, just as Jazz, comic books and Hollywood movies were in the 1930s.
Such were the highfalutin, but perhaps not so fanciful, assertions made from the podium last week at the second edition of Games Convention Asia in Singapore.
First was made by Joonmo Kwon, a psychology major turned entrepreneur whose Nexon Corp. dominates the world's online gaming. Second was by MIT professor Henry Jenkins, author of seminal "Convergence Culture," and who convincingly described contempo games as "transmedia entertainment."
Confab wrapped Saturday with a 'student's day' open to the public. Before that bizzers and designers traded game industry experiences in a region which has a cultural predilection for gaming, but which ranges from the cutting edge to financially backward.
Kwon showed that Asia accounts for 54% of global online gaming and said that growth rates of 26% could make online a $20 billion global industry by 2012. But others pointed to infrastructure problems that are holding back mobile games from reaching their potential in Asia and that in a region where several territories boast mobile penetration significantly in excess of 100% of their populations.
Gary Mi, senior producer at Radiance Digital, gave a dazzling snapshot of China's extraordinary game scene, which is dominated by online games in particular massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. He said that market grew 60% last year and is currently worth $1.5 billion a figure nearly three times the size of country's theatrical box office and counts 140 million players.
Government regulation and local tastes help tip the market in favor of local companies, which claim 60% share. But Mi also pointed to numerous examples of entrepreneurial innovation that in future could make Chinese games companies significant forces overseas.
In a market where most games are played in Internet cafes and most players do not have credit cards, thus leading to the dominance of free-to-play models, he detailed finely-tuned teaser strategies that hook users and tip them towards making micro-payments or subscriptions. These include allowing gamers to buy elements that change the 'game balance' something generally considered anathema in the West quasi-gambling elements and strategies that allow gamers to make real money.
(He also pointed up China's mandatory system of health warnings, ID checks and anti-fatigue devices and explained just how good the country's gamers are at getting around them.)
Mi and Kwon agreed that free to play is not a tweak that needs to be done to make a localized Chinese version of a pre-existing game. Rather they both made case for 'free to play as a business model."
Claas Grimm of designer/publisher 8 Elements explained that worldwide mobile would be a $3.5 billion market this year, but said that Asia Pacific would be marginal to most developer's plans. Problems include payment systems, lack of free data, market fragmentation and short product life-cycles. In particular he noted that Asia's games market is not growing as fast as the mobile phone population the millions of new subscribers per week from India and China are largely opting for low-price handsets and seek basic phone functionality ahead of entertainment options.
Show itself was an inevitably uneven mix of dressed-down-but-earnest conventioneers and louder, flashier types on the floor of the trade show. There, 'cosplay' babes dressed like their avatar idols vied with Karaoke singers thrilled to get their hands on pre-release version of EA's "Rock Band."
Bizarrely, there was also a booth operated by recently-rescued insurance giant AIG. Stand came complete with sales folk uttering "all is well' messages to anyone who willing to tear themselves away from the bright lights and electronica around them and plunge back into what is, despite what Kwon and Jenkins imagine, still the real world.
© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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