A big game show and a new sports MMORPG. Richard covers two topics at once this week. Each Monday, Richard focuses in on the free to play genre in a column he calls "The Free Zone."

FreeStyle Street Basketball is a sports MMOG I first saw around five years ago when I attended the GSTAR show in Korea. Developed by one of that country's "big five" publishers, JCE Corp, at its Tech Tree studio, it's built around instanced three on three play, with persistent characters that have a variety of stats. Some readers might recall that Vivendi released it here in North America in the spring of 2006.

The service was shut down about a year ago. All I could do on my own was to speculate why, but I had the chance to ask JCE Senior VP David Kim, he provided one reason, saying that it was a timing issue. Speaking in retrospect, he felt it was too early to compete effectively against more conventional console titles. I'm not sure the situation was so simple. For instance, while it might not have made a big difference, do you remember a strong marketing and PR effort for the game?

Read it all here.

The lack of coverage of ChinaJoy and GSTAR is an issue for the industry too.

If the games had more coverage over here from these shows then it would help companies see that there are plenty of titles that could be imported and be successful, but usually the only time they get coverage is some random blog or if there is a reason for some to cry foul (HAVE Online is a good example).

 I never got to try FreeStyle. I wonder how many games don't make it over here, simply because the NA audience seems to never step outside their 1 or 2 main games anymore, while at the same time blogging and podcasting about the lack of originality or creativity.

 Oh well, they'll see it soon enough, I hope.

 Beau

i rememebered the name of this game but i couldnt rememberwhat it looked like or what it was about, i actually wanted to try out this game and i cant remember why i didnt, i think it may have been it lacked the spotlight alot of other games got, and while the game looked interesting, i am sure there was something else i wanted to spend my money on instead, after all its a sports mmo, at the time most of the mmo players were playing fantasy or sci fi mmo games, maybe if it was relaunched, with more publicity,never underestimate the power of marketing, even if its just the free mmo fan sites,.thats where i get all my info,we ahve a lot of choices here,and we rely on reviews and hype to make our desisions easier,ultimatly these types of games get lost in the shuffle, i think the grafics would still hold up 3 years later.

This is about the therd time I've tryed to read your columns and every time I do I see something in your articals like this.

"This point of view isn't unusual, but I don't subscribe to it, largely since my interests are more global than most people's. It's true many games shown don't come here. However, there are quite a few I first saw at GSTAR at least a year or two before there was any indication they'd become available in the west; FreeStyle happens to be one of them. More importantly, I learned a lot about key trends that have shaped the worldwide MMOG space over the past few years, and well before I would have had I not gone."

I fill as though you are about to say something......about MMOs and you stop yourself. Are you going to report the news or tell us something that we can talk about. Are you looking for feed back? Or would you fill better about writing for a diffrent Tab" NEWS"?