The Type of Gamer I Am (and the Gaming Market in China)

This intro will be short and I promise not to go too George Washington on ya.

This morning I ran across a Wired blog post on the personalities we adopt when we play video games. I'm kind of the opposite of the author of the post, and I was inspired to write something. Then I figured that I should probably bring China into it, so I searched around for some China video game stuff and found a cool report on China's evolving video game market which should justify me nerding out for a few paragraphs.

The Kind of Gamer I Am
The title of Clive Thompson's post gives you a pretty good idea of the type of gamer he is, Games Give Free Rein to the Douchebag Within. If that was too obtuse, here are a couple of excerpts:

What the hell is wrong with me? There are a lot of ways to win at Civilization Revolution that do not involve taking a happy, peaceful city and reducing it to a smoldering gravesite filled with radioactive trinitite. I could, for example, train my country in brilliant artistry, building Wonders of the World -- a "cultural victory," as it's called. Or I could win by becoming a great economic power, enriching my citizens and the global community.

But no. Every time I plunge into a game, I inevitably choose the most Cro-Magnon, "Hulk smash, Hulk destroy" strategy possible.

...

I repeat: What's wrong with me? One of the classic highbrow defenses of videogames is that they allow you to experience new personalities -- to, in the words of Sherry Turkle, create a "second self." This is considered supremely healthy, because self-exploration is generally a good thing.

But what happens if the second self you create inside videogames turns out to be a total dick?

He then writes that studies find that he's probably just "using games to see life from a different perspective."

If this is the healthy and normal thing that people usually do, then I'm really afraid of what my game preferences say about me. I'm the kind of gamer who thinks that Civilization is lacking in complexity, and that Europa Universalis III could use a few more options to tweak tax collection. First-person shooters? The key to online success better be strong teamwork that requires voice-chatting or I'm bored as hell after a few matches

If we're going with Clive's analogy and the life from a different perspective psychoanalysis, I guess that means I'm well on my my way to becoming just another Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer in "meatspace."

Gaming in China
In my quest for justifying what I just wrote I found a great 2007 report compiled by KPMG, The video games market in China: Moving Online. The main focus of the long report is the environment for foreign investment in Chinese game companies. Along the way are plenty of sidebars containing charts and case studies of both Chinese game companies such as Shanda, and global game companies such as Microsoft, Nintendo, Sega, and Sony. What I want to comment briefly on is the author's suggestion of where the Chinese pricing model for online multiplayer games is going.

Back in Q4 2005, Shanda (盛大) introduced a new pricing model that swept China, and later the world. Shanda dubbed it "Come-Stay-Pay," and others have called it the pay for free model. Under this pricing model you can play for free but you are charged for fancier weapons, armor, clothes, gadgets, and even experience points. This model worked well in China because it created a low entry barrier for players, and software piracy would not have an opportunity to ravage Shanda's revenues in a country with a piracy rate of ~82%. Shanda experienced problems when this model was first adopted, but the stock market responded when they figured out what Shanda had done. We've also seen this model spread to America. The most notable examples are additional content purchases for the single-player TES: Oblivion (along with some consumer backlash), and song purchases for Rock Band.

The KPMG authors argue that the Come-Stay-Pay model will not endure by analogizing to Hollywood:

The development costs required for online gaming will increasingly necessitate a predictable and foreseeable income stream. The film industry, by comparison, has three such streams: (i) cable rights (ie, syndication) and international sales; (ii) advertising, whether in-film or banner advertising (ie, delivering demographics); and (iii) merchandise. Hollywood may aim for the blockbuster, but production companies have covered their costs by the time a movie is released. Any game company not in the same position should be assessed carefully.

I agree, but I'd make a simpler analogy: to the early days of the internet.

The internet in the late-'90s was pretty cool. Just about everything was free. Sure, you might have to pay for a couple of extra features or the removal of screens asking for donations with shareware programs, or maybe send a donation to freeware developers to make yourself feel generous. I loved that internet -- I'm gonna be telling my grandkids stories about that internet. It was the Wild West, and it was vast. If you search hard enough, you can still find that internet, but much of it and the companies providing mostly free service disappeared with the dotcom crash beginning in 2000.

And really, that internet couldn't hold a candle to the internet of today. Sure, you have to pay for stuff, but the quality of programs and services now available on the internet are superior to anything you got when anything went. I've seen the quality of Chinese games, and they're not on par with what we have in America. But, the settings and pricing make sense for China now. As a gamer, I look forward to the day when I can play a Chinese developed Journey to the West game with the production qualities of an American game financed by pricing models that allow higher development costs.