Fighting For the Chinese Gaming Market 31
bart_scriv writes "While lots of ink is being spilled on the Wii/PS3 war, the real battleground for gamers may be in China, where companies Shanda and Netease are fighting for supremacy in the world's largest potential gaming market. The article looks at the companies' dramatically different business models (traditional subscriptions vs. virtual item sales), and offers screen caps of the companies' most popular online games: 'China is even expected to surpass tech-happy South Korea next year as Asia's biggest gaming market. China's overall Internet user base is enormous — about 120 million this year and growing fast. Yet it's a business in flux, and there is a huge debate among companies in this arena about whether to stick to a subscription fee model or go with a free-to-play one to build up a huge online consumer base. The lost revenues would be more than made up by sale of virtual goods (such as ammo for avatars, and so on) and also music and online movies to the legions of gaming fans attracted to its site — or so the theory goes.'"
Pretty much.. (Score:2, Interesting)
I do concur with your conclusion- only the richest Chinese can afford to buy American products, because there is always some shitty knock-off that is good enough. Plus, the lifestyle there is spartan for most people.
The most disturbing trend I see is all the technology transfer going to China: companies want to make their stuff cheaper, partner with an existing chinese company, then send their know-how and IP to China. All this making shit for a cheap price in Asia is going to bite all these people in the ass.
"Red Blindness" article in The Escapist (Score:3, Interesting)
I wrote the article Red Blindness [escapistmagazine.com] (link goes to text version) for The Escapist issue #49. It's about China's fast-developing MMOG scene, the quality issues they're wrestling with, and the prospects for future improvement. The article lists some of the online games made by Shanda, NetEase, and The9.