GameDevMike

NOTE (Feb 12, 2008): If you came here searching for info about Namdaemun or the fire that destroyed it, try this post or this one at my personal blog. I’ll be posting updates there as I hear more about it.

The keynote on Day One of the Korea Games Conference was delivered by Ed Zobrist, President of Sierra Online. Ed’s presentation was titled, “Korean Games and Western Markets - The New Renaissance of the Casual Gaming Space.” Long title, short presentation. Altogether, it lasted a little over 20 minutes. Still, it was quite informative. Mr. Zobrist discussed what it takes to bring Korean games to Western markets. As an example, he carried the audience through the process Sierra Online took to bring JCEntertainment’s FreeStyle Street Basketball title to the West.

The first thing Mr. Zobrist talked about was the art direction. The Korean version of FreeStyle uses a very rough style of art which, as far as I can tell, appears to be inspired by the popular Japanese anime/manga series, Slam Dunk. Sierra’s artists took the Korean art, created versions they felt would be more appealing to the Western markets, then submitted it back to the Koreans for them to reinterpret the Western versions within their original vision. The two styles are noticeably different when viewed side-by-side, but similar enough that they present a coherent vision. Being American, I’m quite sure the original Korean art would have been looked upon as sub-par in the US. Even with the exposure in the West to Japanese anime and manga, that specific style is too rough around the edges for the Western market where the more polished anime style has a cult following. It’s quite popular in Asia, though.

The next point also concerned art — the style of clothing depicted in the game. In the Korean version of FreeStyle, the avatars all wear Korean hip-hop styles. While inspired by American hip-hop fashion, it’s not quite the same. Sierra frequently sent packages containing the latest American hip-hop fashions to the staff at JCE so that they could have a basis to work from in “Westernizing” the clothes. So in addition to adjusting the game’s clothing content, the team members got free clothes. Not a bad deal.

The marketing art also got reworked. As with most games, the art used in the marketing campaigns (aside from screenshots) is somewhat exaggerated from what is actually in the game. The Korean marketing art was, again, the rough manga style, meaning it’s like one of the popular comic books Koreans are forever reading. The art for the Western campaign is cleaner, sharper, and edgier. I don’t know how else to describe it. The Westernized version has a sort of cool factor to it that the Korean version lacks, to my Western eyes.

Moving away from art, Mr. Zobrist brought us to one of the most important points of the process. Localization, as any software developer knows, is a big factor in any international game release. It’s important to make sure the interface and text in the game matches the locale where the game is distributed, both in terms of translation and formatting (dates/money/etc…). Mr. Zobrist said that what’s even more important is culturization. Casual gamers in Korea are miles ahead of casual gamers in the West, especially Americans, in terms of ability. It’s not far-fetched to equate the casual Korean gamer with the hardcore Western gamer. As such, Korean games are hard for Westerners. They require a level of skill that most Western gamers just don’t have. So when releasing in the West, it’s important for Korean developers to adjust the difficulty of their games to match their market’s abilities. One of the ways this was done in FreeStyle was by making it easier to level (a basketball game with the concept of levels… hmmm).

From there, Mr. Zobrist talked about marketing and the various distribution channels available in the West. He’s a strong believer in multi-million dollar marketing campaigns. This isn’t at all applicable to indies in the downloadable games space, though, so I won’t spend time on it.

While the talk was aimed at big-budget studios developing mainstream titles, the points I highlighted above could potentially have value for indie developers. As far as I can tell, many indies don’t even localize their games, much less invest in modifying the content for different markets. One of the selling points for WoW in Korea, aside from the popularity of Blizzard courtesy of the Starcraft and Diablo 2 craze here, is that the architecture of the Night Elf city is based on Korean architecture. In fact, the main city gate is a model of the Great South Gate (Namdaemun) in Seoul. While that’s not exactly what Mr. Zobrist was talking about, it is in the same vein and, I think, something more suitable for indies. Adding content to your game that appeals to specific cultures would be a much cheaper way of nodding to those markets than replacing all of your content with market-specific versions. The idea of culturization could also work for indie games. It wouldn’t be too much effort for a casual developer to sell a more difficult version of a game to Korean customers, for example.

Nothing from this presentation applied directly to anything I’m doing, but it did open my eyes to the bigger picture. I have no experience at all in international marketing and never at all considered what it takes to promote a product across borders.

Here’s a pic of Mr. Zobrist at the lecturn:

Technorati Tags: KGC2006, Korea Games Conference, FreeStyle, basketball, games, video games, marketing, Korea, Sierra