Possibilities and Prospects of On-Line Games in Asia

Abstract

This chapter presents a perspective of on-line gaming (networked commercial games), especially the situation and prospects in Asia. The worldwide number of paying users of on-line games for 2001–2002 was about 10 million, and it is possible to estimate a market size of about US $1 billion. However, this is a very conservative estimation. The entire game market, inclusive of packaged games, has been forecast to grow at a considerable pace into the future, and in particular, most research institutes are predicting that the on-line game market will expand considerably more rapidly than that of the game market as a whole. For example, against the forecast of PricewaterhouseCoopers of the United States that the North American video game market, which was $7.8 billion in 2002, will grow to $13.5 billion, about 1.7 times its size, by the year 2007, Informa Publishing Group of the United Kingdom forecast that the on-line game market, which was $568 million worldwide in 2001, will grow to $5.648 billion, about ten times its size, by the year 2006. Also, in the case of Korea, which is one of Asia’s leading countries in on-line gaming, the total value of on-line game shipments has been growing fast: in 1998 it was only $2.5 million, in 1999 it was $16 million, in 2000 it was $100 million, and in 2002 it was $250 million. For Japan, packaged games are still the mainstream, but changes are also being seen in that market. According to the Digital Content Association of Japan, a research institute affiliated with the Japanese government, Japan’s domestic market for packaged games in 2002 was about $4 billion, remaining at a year-on-year growth rate of 1.1 times. On the other hand, on-line games surged to about $55 million in sales, with a year-on-year growth rate of 4.2 times. The association has also forecast the 2003 network game market to be $170 million. One assumes that there are a number of compound factors underlying such fast growth in on-line games, but excluding infrastructure aspects such as the