Gaming in Asia, with Frank Yu

When you need to know about gaming in China, you turn to Frank Yu. The former Microsoftie is one of the most informed people on electronic gaming in Asia, and was recently interviewed by the China Business Network. Well worth the listen.

Frank was the one who told me about Zhengtu Network, an MMORPG peculiar to Asian and, specifically, Chinese tastes. Its melee-style battles and concept of “fair play” is rather different than Western norms of game design. From last week, there was a video blog by Thomas Crampton where I talked a bit about Zhengtu, and Kaiser Kuo talks about P2P video.

Zhengtu’s free-to-play and virtual merchandising is consistent with other Asian online revenue models (like MapleStory and Cyworld). My not-even-teenage nieces in Singapore were completely addicted to MapleStory’s cartoonish game play, and they wind up stumping me each visit when they demo the latest hot game with the youth market I’ve never even heard of. I increasingly turn to them for trendspotting as I’ve gone from “Cool Trendy Uncle” into “You’re So Yesterday Uncle.” They taught me about Habbo.com, even though they’re not allowed to have an account on it. Mom’s orders.

At least I can still crush them to smithereens in Wii Tennis, which going by news reports, absolutely proves I’m an old fogey.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 4:22 am and is filed under Asia, China, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.