Gaming in Asia

As some of you may know from Socko's Pro Wrestling Review, I'm currently living in Taiwan. Since I don't have anything new to say this week (it's tough to finish a game when you're playing 6 or 7 of them at once, and one of them is Final Fantasy...) I thought I'd do a repost from my personal blog on the local gaming culture.



These are just my personal observations from my time in Thailand, Taiwan and Malaysia.

I went looking for a videogame store in the 'big town' nearby, and was surprised to find that there isn't one. The town has a Subway, a McDonalds and a KFC, dozens of clothes stores, several DVD stores and bookshops - but no videogame stores. Back home, there would definitely be a Game in a town that size, maybe even a HMV, a Blockbusters etc, and buying games would be no problem, but in Taiwan there is nothing to be found.

The whole gaming culture is different here. The PC is the platform of choice, and people play mainly free to play MMOs or Counterstrike, or CS clones.

The main reason for this is one of economics. In an internet cafe, an hour is roughly $20 (40p). Or, at my local one, you can pay $100 (£2) for a 9-hour session. I'm not going to lie and pretend I've never done a 9-hour game session before, but I've rarely planned to do so in advance. The fact that enough people plan to do this ahead of time that they have special deals for them seems very weird - a little worrying, even.

Compare the cost of a 9 hour game session to a new PS3 game. Heavy Rain (which I still haven't played, dammit) is going for roughly $1,500 (£30). In order to get the same number of hours out of the game as compared to dropping $1,500 in an internet cafe, the game would need to be 135 hours long. Most games are 8 - 12 hours long, even exceptionally long games like Final Fantasy are only 50-70 hours. It's just not economical to play console games compared to going to the internet cafe (and that's without considering the cost of the hardware).

People are also a lot more tolerant of f2p (free to play) games here. In the west, most people tend to turn their noses up at MMOs. Most MMO gamers are playing WOW, as well as a sizeable migrant population that goes from new game to new game every few months, as well as a few die-hard fans of games most people have either never heard of or forgotten about. F2p games are only really played regularly by kids, who can't afford to pay for a subscription based game each month. But when the kids grow up and can afford the fees, they will graduate to pay to play. This is mainly down to production values - P2P games have much higher budgets and are far more polished than F2P, which is important in the west - less so in Asia, it seems.

Also, in Asia they are a lot more tolerant of grinding. This is a cultural thing, children here are schooled using the Confucian system where things are learned by repetition...they say the same thing over and over again until it sticks in their head. In the west, of course, we use the Platonic(?) system of writing everything down to remember it, and asking questions when we don't understand something, with comparatively little repetition. So, grinding the same mobs for nine hours is much less of a turn-off for Asian gamers than it is for Westerners. MMOs are notoriously grindy (hell, the word 'grind' comes from the MMO world...), and F2P games are even more so, which puts off a lot of gamers in the west but isn't an issue here.

That's not to say that consoles are non-existent here, in the cities there are games stores that seem pretty similar to their UK counterparts. Ok, they're a lot less dingy and the customers don't look like horrific social rejects, and they're usually well-lit...but apart from that they're basically the same. But console gaming is far less of a big deal, don't expect a small town to have the same kind of console game availability as a similar sized town in the West.