MMORPGs in China are big--bigger than portals and whatnot. Big in Korea too.

Lots of facts and figures coming out about these on-line gaming environments, what they charge, and how much they make. Engineers in China cost about $1,500/year so it's very cheap to build these things.

Sony's Everquest is the biggest in the US, but it doesn't compare to China.In Korea, real police have investigated people for theft in the virtual world.

There's now revenge in the physical world for things that happen in the digital world.

There's re-sale (on eBay) of digital assets.

Some people are able to earn a living playing games.

Casual gaming, IM, Avatars. QQ IM in China.

Selling clothing on-line--clothing that decays!!!

Mainstream brands are crossing over too.

NeoPets is targeted at children. Very sticky.

SecondLife by LindedLabs build dev tools for people in the world to create the world. (Funky!) It's all user-developed content and there's a ton of it. Very good quality. Games within games. Classrooms.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

Posted by jzawodn at October 07, 2004 12:34 PM

Reader Comments
# Atul Chitnis said:

Jeremy - would be nice if you could set up a web20 topic in the blog instead of generically including it in linuxmag topic, so that these notes can remain a permanent web asset instead of scrolling off as you add more stuff to the linuxmag topic.

on October 7, 2004 01:30 PM
# BillSaysThis said:

"MMORPGs in China are big--bigger than portals and whatnot. Engineers in China cost about $1,500/year so it's very cheap to build these things."

Sure but that salary also means they can't pay $10/month for the game access either.

on October 7, 2004 01:36 PM
# Jeremy Zawodny said:

The web 2.0 archive is http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/cat_web2.html.

on October 7, 2004 02:37 PM
# Tom Busch said:

"Some people are able to earn a living playing games."

hmmm...It doesn't get any better than that, I guess.

on October 8, 2004 02:32 AM
# David Scott Lewis said:

Gurley's figures are wrong. Even the lowest cost centers pay better than US$1,500 per year for programmers. The range in pay is from $2,000 to about $12,000 for programmers with virtually no experience up to those with a Bachelor's and a couple/few years of experience; fully-burdened rates are $2/hour to $10/hr. I also suspect that Bill Gurley has: 1) NEVER been to any of the cities which pay so little (they're quite miserable), and 2) does NOT even know which cities I'm talking about!! ;-)

on October 11, 2004 07:28 PM
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