Massively^™

China has high unemployment, and young people hang out in cybercafe's all day, doing nothing but playing games. In a setting like this, there's probably more of a perchance that a single person plays multiple games over time...it might just be that a few of them get lucky at a certain time to be able to claim so many concurrent logins.

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Most Chinese gamers get to download MMOGs for free and pay pennies on the hour to play. Not to mention China alone equals 20% of the world's population (6.6 billion estimated globally) fielding a million shouldn't be that surprising. Also South Korea's gamers are born and raised in pc baangs. All the consoles were embargoed at one time, and that is why MMOG gaming is bigger there, oh and a little something called Starcraft. It is still pretty cool to field a million concurrent players. In the grand scheme of things it really dwarfs other MMOGs like EVE. bleh!

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Bots! =-P

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Eastern based players (specifically South Korean players) seem willing to accept incredibly badly repetitive (grinding) gameplay as the norm in their games of choice. So I wouldn't weight raw player numbers alone as the critical factor in determining a game's overall strength.

It seems clear that asian players LOVE MMO's in general, but as a consequence of that love, there is a very low bar for success in asian markets. I think the qualities that make a game successful in eastern markets would not necessarily be good factors to study in making a game successful worldwide.

In other words; they're okay with playing crappy games as long as they're flashy and pretty and cotton-candy like. But building games like that isn't going to help you advance the state of the art to reach a mass market worldwide. You need to explore gameplay models that increase the depth of play instead of simple trendwatching.

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