MMOs Evolve, Globalize, Hold Funeral Services

Computer Gaming World has put up the first edition of a recurring feature entitled Online Evolution. The series aims to explore the history of the increasingly popular MMORPG genre, explain how the industry works, and discuss where it's heading. It goes all the way back to CompuServe's Isle of Kesmai, the text-based precursor to today's full-fledged online worlds (at $12/hour, no less), and moves up to our-current day fare. It's actually somewhat surprising how many different pricing schemes MMOs have managed to adopt worldwide. Gaming Steve also has MMOs on the brain, but he's more concerned with one title in one particular country: World of Warcraft in China. He contextualizes Blizzard's great equalizer of the genre into the rest of the online Chinese gaming market, pointing out that WoW is not quite the same first-place success it is in the Western world. For example, while the industry was celebrating WoW as the first (Western) MMO to reach one million subscribers, the online game MU reached 15 million users in China soon after its release. WoW is growing quickly, though; analysts expect it to hit at least 10 million in China, and the game has certainly demonstrated its ability to appeal to players of all types. The Chinese market has all sorts of considerations that simply do not exist elsewhere in the world, as detailed in the annual report of The9, the company that operates WoW and various other MMOs in China. It notes that all games must be approved by the "State Council, the State Press and Publication Administration, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Public Security," which can also enact regulations on the industry. Even SARS is noted as a factor that negatively impacted The9's bottom line. There's also that three-hours-at-a-time limit that the Chinese government has mandated to discourage addictive levels of game playing. That legislation was sure to be a hot issue when a Chinese WoW player passed away while playing the game for an extended period of time. An in-game funeral service was held in her honor. Yahoo! News China has a screenshot of the event.