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GDC Shed Light on US Mindset for "Social" Games
At GDC a
persistent topic was "social" games. It is now Lisa Hanson's leading personal
pet peeve to hear people talk about a narrow segment of online games as
"social" when in China it is very obvious that almost all online games are
social. Being "social" is already the leading cause for gaming in China. What the
correct term should be is SNS games -
or games that are distributed via the social networking sites channel, for
example Facebook in most of the world or RenRen and Q-Zone in China. It is fascinating to consider that games in
the US (and perhaps other western countries) historically have not been
considered to be social or a social form of entertainment. Perhaps when that
vast divide gets crossed we will get closer to a truly global game
rather than a great game that is localized into multiple languages.
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Lisa Hanson
Moderated "Gaming Without Borders" Panel at Games Beat @ GDC
The Gaming Without
Borders panelists included Klaas Kersting of Gameforge (Germany), Tomoko Namba
of DeNA (Japan), Won Il Sue of Nexon America (US, from Korea), and Aroon Tan of
Magma Studios (Singapore). The panel was interesting because these panelists
shared their perspectives about gaming in a global sense, what it takes to be
successful internationally and whether or not a game company could be
successful outside of its own country (probably, but not always).
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ChinaJoy Poised
to be a Big Conference After All
With all of the
confusion in regulatory authority of the GAPP and Ministry of Culture, it was
difficult to determine whether the GAPP-backed show ChinaJoy would continue its
8-year run of being the leading conference for China's video game industry.
ChinaJoy is both B2B and B2C focused, whereas DigiChina, the show backed by the
Ministry of Culture, is B2B only and typically much smaller. It turns out that
even though the Ministry of Culture captured some of the regulatory authority
formerly held by GAPP, ChinaJoy will still be a big deal in 2010. It seems that
there will be more booths, more sub-conferences, and more speakers than ever
before. At least the GAPP still has control over that.
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