A few weeks ago, Gamasutra posted a recap of a talk given by Zhan Ye entitled “Game Designers – Everything You Know is Wrong”. I read the article the day it was published, and then made everyone on my team read it too. It’s very very good, especially if you have any kind of interest, personal or professionally, in developing free-to-play microtransaction-based online games for China.
I now work for a Chinese company (Tencent) who specialize in making online games for the Chinese market. One of the main design challenges is trying to figure out how to think like a Chinese gamer — What do they like; How do they like to express themselves; How do they like to play, etc. We spend a lot of time with our Chinese partners discussing the subtle differences between Chinese and Western gamers.
Anyways, the gist of the article is that if you approach designing a game for China using the same “rules” as you would if you were designing a game for the West, you WILL fail. It then proceeds to give a list of reasons with examples.
The information in the article generally matches with the conclusions we’d made — Chinese players expect completely different things from their games than Western players do. And, of course, it’s vitally important that you figure those things out before you dump millions of dollars into developing a game for China.
Overall, I agree with everything in the article. However, there’s a lot of it that makes me feel professionally very uncomfortable.
I re-read the article again today after Josh Drescher tweeted about it.
What I found the most interesting the second time through were the comments. The majority of which are marvelously arrogant (in that way that only opinionated designers can be), completely reinforcing the point that Zhan Ye was trying to make. There’s an overall tone of dismissal in the comments as if the author just made everything up. Astonishing.
Many comments smack of “we are Western developers and we know best”, conveniently missing the warning at the beginning of the article that this attitude is the road to failure. One observer even makes the comparison that, design-wise, free-to-play games are “B-rate”, while many of the other commenters are squarely just in the blinkered “microtransactions are evil” camp. One observer even makes the classic schoolboy mistake of invoking Halo, ironic because that game has had enormous problems breaking into the Chinese market (for all the reasons given in the article).
Many of the game features that appear in Chinese games do so, not purely because it’s the most brutally effective way of removing money from the player, but because Chinese players (culturally) really dig those features.
For example, Chinese players really REALLY want to stand out and they really want to EXPRESS themselves. They want to be able to show off (hard to do if you don’t stand out). Chinese players are also totally fine with “money spent” being one of the vectors used to quantify their avatar’s customization. They also really like features that accentuate socializing – marriages often have systematic benefits in Chinese MMOs; while guilds are complicated systems and are way more than just chat channels (yeah, I’m looking at you WoW). The commenters should have been focusing on “why did the guy want to give the girl some flowers” instead of assuming that the game was inherently sexist.
Chinese players want moments of drama to punctuate the experience when they play online games – these moments are great forums for self expression. For example, they generally prefer “unfair” unregulated PvP (free-for-all open-world gank fests) to “sports”-based PvP (battlegrounds, scenarios, etc).
So while the Chinese MMO industry is clearly much much younger than ours, not all the game features that appear regularly in Chinese games do so because of any kind of immaturity in the market. In fact, Chinese games often embrace the two Ms (Massively and Multiplayer) much harder and better than their Western counterparts.
Also, it would be very foolish indeed to dismiss the entire free-to-play model out of hand. I totally get that a lot of Western players have a Pavlovian hatred toward microtransactions. I’m not overly fond of them myself. I think that’s because it’s often assumed that those for-sale items are absolutely required somehow to progress through the game past a certain point. In reality, that’s not the way to do microtransactions, and everyone doing them knows it. Again, Zhan Ye’s remarks about microtransactions are well worth reading.
In fact, the whole article is. If you have any interest at all in the booming Chinese MMO industry and/or how to make a successful game for China, I strongly recommend reading/absorbing the article.
