Outside the American Markets

by Mistress Nightshadow 

Well, before I even start, I would like to thank Lexcanium, The director of New Media at RPGamer for giving me the basis to write this, and a thank you also goes out to Paramekia or KappaTI for giving the #RPGamer log for me to work with. [Sorry guys, I forgot... I can't remember who gave me most of the log... if you did do it, e-mail me, and I'll give you the proper credit.]

I'm probably willing to bet that half of you guys would probably be wondering what the hell was happening in there for any conversation to have any meaning within the walls of IRC #RPGamer to justify anything... but first a little background.

I was shopping in Chinatown in Sydney on Friday, August 4th, with a friend of mine, and we were looking for anime... but on the way, we ran into stacks and stacks of Chinese games on the PC. Hundreds of RPGs at that.

So what I hear you say? There's hundreds of games released on the PC in Chinese.
Fair enough, but the point that whammed something very interesting home to me was the minimum specs to play many of the games. A Pentium 2 300 and a 3D accelerator card in fact for many of these games... most of them made very recently.

Now, as we all know, China has approxmently 1.2 billion people. But we also 'know' that most of China can't afford these systems... which makes them an unimportant market...

All of this background led into an interesting discussion with Lexcanium, head of the New Media section of RPGamer two days later. [I wouldn't know his real name.]

Now, what was the topic? Why America is the second largest base for conventions, particularly the RPG ones, after Japan. After the jokes about what would happen if they didn't hold them there, it came out quite interesting...

The gist of the conversation? Well... out of the 300 or so million people who live in America, about 25% of them own some sort of system [according to Lexcanium, who attended lectures at conventions to back it up], and which most, if not all of you reading this make up, giving about 80 million... which makes up our American market.

In China, the figure was suggested to be about 4-5%, that a much smaller fraction of the Chinese population own a system.  Fair enough. But that 4-5% turned out to be about 40 to 60 million people... but even then, that still doesn't rival the American market.

Even if the market was indeed that big, it could be suggested that since the Chinese currency was nothing compared to the American Dollar, revenue wouldn't be nearly as much as in America...

But none of this could dispel the fact that games made in Chinese were needing pretty good hardware to run games... in fact, that was pretty much close to the top line games marketed in America, if not surpass it. They certainly surpassed the last RPG I looked at, that's for sure. But wait a second, not many Chinese in China actually can afford to buy such a game, let alone the computer needed as a bare minimum to run it... can they?

What am I trying to get at here? The first would be that we don't know almost anything about the Chinese market. That 4-5% was mainly a guess. Neither of us, Lex or I, have ever seen the figures to how consoles or anything else for that matter sold there, and Lexcanium even told me that no one at RPGamer knew anything about the state in China. For all we know, it's a staggering 10% [120 million people], which could seriously surpass the American market, and seriously rival the Japanese one.

Secondly, I guess this brings into question wherether America is the second hub of the RPG and otherwise gaming world. No company would try to make a game which few people could even run, particularly so when there's a massive market of millions of people ready to snap up any RPG [Strategy and Action games as well] at America. If any company tried marketing a game which only a few people were capable to play, and even fewer would be interested in playing, they'd go bankrupt in a matter of months.

And it's not all no namers either. Komani managed to land in that heap I listed... what looked to be the latest Rockman and Forte game landed in there. [A Megaman game, for those who don't know.] But still America is the second hub of the RPG and gaming world... look at all the conventions, but really, I'm starting to wonder if it really is.

Maybe what I'm trying to get at is that China is starting to be a real market... not in the ten or twenty years time we would have thought... but right now.

Which also leaves companies another market to run to if they get disatisifed with the American market for any reason. Particularly so when the local population aren't used to complaining at the top of their lungs due to political reasons.

Interesting speculation that came out of the last place you'd expect good conversation to come out of, isn't it?

Well, if you'd like to chat about this, be it that Chinese would be a good language aquisition if one wants a better taste of the RPG market, that China isn't worth the people it has when it comes to games, or you'd just like to scream out that I'm trying to spread commumism and would rather sick hundreds of vigilanties on me, give me a call at nightshadow_007@angelfire.com. But really, why would I want to support something which would want to shut me up from writing anything except the government line?