Of China's 60 million netizens, 40.5 percent are regular
visitors to 5,292 online game websites.
Good and bad
Early in April 2002, The Legend of Mir II, imported
from the Republic of Korea by Shanghai Shanda Ltd, attracted
250,000 simultaneous users and became the world's most popular
online game.
In a report published earlier this year the State Press and
Publication Administration confirmed that in 2003 online games
earned the domestic market 1.32 billion yuan, an amount likely to
increase to 6.7 billion yuan by 2007. This is good news for game
operators as it confirms that China's online game industry is the
year 2004's most attractive investment proposition.
Potential profits are always a happy prospect, but they come at
a price. In China, as everywhere, compulsive obsessives are
attracted to online games like moths to a flame. On March 6, 2004,
a 31-year old Legend of Mir II addict literally dropped
dead after playing the game non-stop for 20 hours in a Chengdu
Internet café. Soon after this tragedy, a Shanghai online game
player suffered serious burns on an attempted self-immolation after
the Shanda Customer Service Department expropriated his virtual
equipment for The Legend of Mir II that he had bought from other
players for 10,000 yuan. Then on April 11 the first case of online
virtual currency fraud, to the tune of 15,000 yuan, was exposed by
Dalian police.
A phenomenon of online game dimensions is bound to have its
downside. Whether or not it can be minimized remains to be seen,
but a look at the history of cyber games in China gives some idea
of its future as a mainstream leisure activity.
Beginnings
Online games came to China at the start of the 1990s when MUD
(Multiple User Dimension) scored a hit with China's earliest
netizens. They emerged from college and university computer
laboratories and were mostly adapted from foreign MUDs.
The year 2000 was the beginning of a golden age of cyber games
in China, with hugely popular games like King of Kings, SG (The
Three Kingdoms) Online, and Xiao Ao Jiang Hu's Jing Zhong Bao Guo.
In 2001, Ourgame.com, a company that started out with elementary
games like Chinese Chess and Go, became the world's biggest online
game website when it chalked up 20 million subscribers and a record
170,000 simultaneous users. Today, ourgame.com has 130 million
subscribers and has scored in excess of 580,000 simultaneous
players. An influx of Korean online games had huge impact on the
Chinese market with the famous Legend of Mir II, regarded as
second-rate in its motherland but the most popular online game ever
in China.
Then, in 2002 RPG (Role Playing Games) became the mainstream,
accounting for 75.7 percent of all online games played in China.
Netease's Da Hua Xi You Online, Shanda's Legend of Mir II and Ninth
City's MU were all smash hits. Korean games topped the market,
followed by those made in China, Taiwan and Japan. That year the
online game market showed a 213.8 percent increase.
The trend continued in 2003, but there were ructions in the
online gaming sector. The Korean owners of The Legend of Mir II
terminated their cooperation with Shanda and lawsuits were raised
in protest at the money making machinations of online game
companies, making the legal rights of cyber players a hot topic.
This was also the year that the government began to pay more
attention to the online game industry and to support domestically
produced games. All in all, there were more games giving raise to
fiercer competition, more money, and ever more losers.
Two hard nuts to crack
* Cheat programs
"You can't possibly play without a cheat program", says Ms Yu, a
relative newcomer to online games, "Everyone knows that."
It's true that practically every online game player in China
cheats. There are all kinds of these euphemistically termed
auxiliary routines. Most simulate a working computer keyboard and
mouse and help players ascend into the virtual world faster and
more easily.
Cheat programs are the main source of conflict between online
consumers and companies. They save the former money and deprive the
latter of optimum profit, and are the subject of discussion on
almost every game website. Although disdained by players looking
for a fair game, anyone not using them is bound to lose (games)
because everyone else does. They are the bugbear of game companies,
because in shortening the time it takes to learn and play a game,
these so-called auxiliary routines bleed online company
profits.
* Private servers
Private servers were also born out of player discontent with the
boring, repetitive exercises incorporated into online games purely
as a money spinning tactics. They emerged through players that had
abandoned official websites build a virtual world of their own. But
the growing number of users has tainted the originality of private
servers. They set up shop-soiled servers using pirated games and
solicit customers through adlets. Most are now paid websites that
share the market with official game servers and make even more
money, taking into account the rate of returns. There are calls to
combat and destroy private servers, while certain online companies
demand that they be commercialized. Private servers are generally
acknowledged as a serious problem in today's online game
market.
Cheat programs and private servers bring some benefits to
players, and to some extent express customer dissatisfaction with
game companies. But they also make clear the chaotic state of the
market and absence of regulatory laws. More serious, the illegal
trade engendered by this chaos appears to have the tacit approval
of the masses.
Enjoyable all the same
As far as online gamers are concerned, cheat programs and
private servers are the responsibility of the government,
legislature and market. They meanwhile continue to play away in
their beloved virtual world.
"What people ultimately seek and find in games is a sense of
achievement unattainable in real life," says A-Du, a 23-year-old
Beijing game lover, adding "They also experience joy in the
exquisite imagery, symphonic music and thrill of creating fantasy."
He is a video and computer game aficionado of 10 years'
standing.
"People find true love in the virtual world of online games,"
writes one Dragon Raja player in an article in which he goes on to
describe how the game brought him four romances, the last of which
he will remember for the rest of his life. To people like him,
online games are played for far more than just fun.
Anyway, Online games are the means to enter a world that seems
entirely real, but is actually a complete escape from reality.
(China
Today, May 30, 2004)