Nice market you have there, I'll take that now.

A new market forecast from a global research firm puts the global MMO market at $8 billion this year, thanks largely to growth in China and Korea. Gamasutra, which unlike me could apparently afford the $2000 to read it, notes:

the MMORPG industry can be essentially considered as two regions, with Blizzard Entertainment dominating the “slowly growing” Western market, and publishers such as Shanda, Netease, Nexon, and NCsoft driving most of the MMORPG market’s growth in Asia.

Strategy Analytics believes MMORPGs in the Western market are showing signs of a slowdown due to competition with console video games and the rising popularity of social games. It also says that the traditional subscription model in many Western MMORPGs has “lost traction and growth momentum.”

It goes on to assert that future growth in the Western market will be spurred on by Asian companies entering the US market, because, you know, that never happened before.

SMASH THE FOREIGN LEVEL DESIGNERS AND THEIR MARKETING LACKEYS

China quits flirting with blocking foreigners from their online gaming market and just flat out says “yeah, you ferengi aren’t welcome“.

China’s video game industry regulator the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) and copyright watchdog issued a circular on Saturday prohibiting foreign investment in domestic online gaming operations through joint ventures, wholly owned enterprises and cooperatives.

The new directive also disallows foreign firms from indirectly influencing Chinese gaming firms through agreements or technology support.

It remains to be seen how this will effect large joint ventures already in place in China. This blog implies that part of the issue is a turf war between two powerful government agencies.

Interestingly, a Ministry of Culture (MoC) official “expressed his shock” (link in Chinese) at GAPP’s latest announcements, saying it clearly violates the State Council’s earlier guidelines. It’s quite rare to see different branches of the government argue in public, but the MoC will probably take some further actions to protect their turf.

That same blog also includes quotes to Chinese market commentators saying that at a minimum this means another closure for World of Warcraft while they pay the correct bribes get their paperwork in order.

In any event I’m sure this was all a pleasant surprise for all the Westerners in town for GDC China this week!

Hong Kong-based NetDragon Websoft will develop the massively multiplayer online game — where thousands or millions of players play simultaneously in a virtual world — in conjunction with EA’s Mythic Entertainment division. NetDragon Websoft will have the exclusive license to operate the game in China, Hong Kong, Macau and India.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government has approved the release of Wrath of the Lich King and provisionally allowed NetEase to relaunch the game after a long downtime which caused some discontent!

Thousands of anxious gamers who have been missing the game are expected to gather at today’s opening of Chinajoy, an online game carnival in Shanghai, to demand the game be made available again, the Southern Weekly reported last Saturday.

“As a large consumption group, we at least have the right to know when will the game be re-opened or will it be re-booted,” the newspaper quoted a WoW fan, named Laode, as saying.

WoW fans vented their anger by logging on to servers belonging to Netease on July 11. After 5,000 signed on at the same time, they succeeded in paralyzing seven servers.

WoW players also left nearly 3,000 complaints on the official website of China Consumers’ Association and some players said they planned to sue.

So, for those keeping track: protesting racial inequality in Xinjiang is bad, protesting talent spec inequality in Wintergrasp is fine.

However, everything seems to be back on track now, thus showing that the appropriate palms were greased that Blizzard and NetEase showed the appropriate awareness of socialist norms and morals.

Despite the barrage of inquiries, the troubled sites are keeping mum until then. Only Item Ria, which experienced connection problems, posted a notice on its site explaining the reason behind the shut-down. “We were under pressure from hackers, and a temporary shut-down for maintenance was necessary to scale up our security,” it said.

An Internet security expert said they got an inquiry demanding to know why so many Chinese users are logging on to the trading sites. He suspects it is highly likely that hackers have broken into the sites. Whereas in the past hackers simply took money from Internet users by tracing down their IDs and passwords, now they reached the point of threatening the sites themselves.

I fervently pray something has been lost in the translation.

Incorruptible Warrior, the truly bizarre anti-graft game from the land of some truly bizarre MMOs, has gone offline. This translation of a Chinese newspaper article has some details of the game:

When you kill a corrupt official, you gain experience points. For example, killing the notorious eunuch official Wei Zhongxian from the Ming dynasty gains you 100 experience points. As you accumulate points, you increase your powers for “Combatting corruption,” “Moral character” and “Degree of being corruption free” instead of the usual “life,” “magic” and “strength” in other kinds of games. Your ultimate goal is to reach <Honest and Corruption-Free Paradise>, where “the birds sing, the flowers give out fragrance, the people are full of love and harmony, the nation is prospering and the world is calm and peaceful.”

And from that noted game review site the Wall Street Journal,

Incorruptible Warrior went live in July — for about three weeks — before it was taken down. The Ningbo government hasn’t offered an explanation, though at one point it posted a message on the game’s main Web site citing technical difficulties. Officials of China’s Ministry of Culture — which regulates the online-games industry and normally would be the agency to shutter a game for excessive violence or other violations — said they had nothing to do with shutting down Incorruptible Warrior. Other central government officials in Beijing declined to comment or didn’t respond to requests for an interview.

The game went live amid a rash of high-level corruption cases — from the July execution of the nation’s top drug watchdog for graft to last fall’s disgrace of the Shanghai Communist Party boss for mismanaging pension funds. It also sparked heated debate on the Chinese Internet, which at 162 million users is now the second-largest, following the U.S.

Still, some players and industry analysts theorize that Incorruptible Warrior was less a victim of Chinese politics than of shaky history, slow speeds and bad design.

“Lots of people laughed at the graphics,” observes Leon Zhang, a blogger from Nanjing.

Clearly, the Serious Games movement is alive and well in China.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAVVVMcTShQ

More on this on the BBC.

“With all due respect, E3 is a gathering for the old school videogame industry,” he says. “It’s driven by consoles, and it’s all about the retail channel — people pushing hardware and selling boxes. We think the future of gaming is very different. The Internet has given developers a real opportunity to play on a level playing field–to create a market where the best ideas win. And the breeding ground for the best ideas right now is here — in Asia.”

Hong is in Shanghai, at a conference that, by scheduling itself in direct opposition to E3, seems to be throwing down a gauntlet before its all-too-complacent Western counterpart. While E3 has pulled into its shell, distancing itself from its public, the China Digital Entertainment Expo & Conference — commonly known as “ChinaJoy” — remains a deliriously all-access occasion, with a host of fan-friendly features, like cosplay competitions, open-entry gaming tournaments and, of course, scantily clad exhibit hostesses, commonly called “booth babes.”