eamon angelface wrote:
Anyway...when i said Korean I meant developing the games. I know they love them so why don't they make them in the same capacity as Japan?
I'm going to quote the final section of
Gamer Nation, from
The Escapist, which is a weekly online publication about videogames. For comparison's sake,
The Escapist is to
Esquire what
IGN is to
US Weekly. I've added boldface to emphasize a point, with regard to this particular topic, and keep in mind that this article was published in July, 2005, so it may be a touch dated. I also highly recommend reading the linked article, because it's terribly interesting (as articles from
The Escapist generally are).
Korean Games in America, and Vice Versa
The Korean National Tourism Organization pushes a buzzword, "hallyu" ("Korean wave"), the new enthusiasm for Korean pop culture in Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Over there, hallyu is driven by Korea's feverish TV soap operas. Here, "hallyu" is only just now impinging on American awareness. The dedicated trend-watcher can find a few Korean films, some manga and, most notably, online games.
Seoul's online giant NCSoft runs the world's biggest MMORPG, Lineage, which has seven million subscribers. To import Lineage to America, NCSoft established a beachhead office in Austin, Texas, run by Richard "Lord British" Garriott and his brother Robert. But Lineage made disappointing headway here (though Lineage II has done better). Another import, Webzen's Shattered Galaxy, tanked. Prospects aren't much better for online golf and the like.
Other attempts to cross the Pacific have been hit-or-miss in both directions. In the Republic of Korea, Blizzard's World of Warcraft bids fair to match its blockbuster precursor, StarCraft. But the games distributed by NCSoft Austin - City of Heroes and the new Guild Wars - hit big in America, yet have met only tepid response in Korea.
The two nations' games show different cultural assumptions. "Korean games are all about community, prestige, and hierarchy," said venture capitalist John Woongjae Lee at the 2003 Austin Game Conference. "Graphics aren't as important as customer service, fast patching, and speed-of-light adaptation" to new customer desires. Conversely, the graphics in some Korean games can turn off a Western viewer. Magic in these games is showy, spectacular, with vivid rainbow colors. Show these effects to an American EverQuest player and he may sniff, "That's not what a fireball looks like."
In short, there's a software industry out there, but their local tastes are so different from our own that most of the games never make it to our shores. Japan is much the same way, although I've been surprised that some of the DS and Wii games, such as
Cooking Mama, have actually made it over. If you ever played the original
Lineage, after having played a post-
Ultima Online MMO, you'd have laughed and said, "What the fuck is this shit? People
pay to play this?" And that's why it failed miserably, despite what Lord British thought when he brought it over.
As for what's coming from Korea in the future, the only one that comes to mind is
Huxley, which is supposed to be a massively-multiplayer first-person shooter, like the bastard child of
Unreal Tournament and
Planetside, which isn't altogether a bad combination. It'll likely carry a monthly fee, which I'm sure many Xbox 360 players will balk at. Whether or not
Huxley will ship this year like it's supposed to, who knows, but it's very pretty, as it's built on the
Unreal 3.0 engine, which also powers
Gears of War, amongst several other games.