In this week's F2P column, looks at how too often Eastern and Western markets are considered their own homogeneous groups with their own homogeneous desires.
Despite the huge and rapidly growing number of people who comprise the free to play audience in the western hemisphere, there's still a lingering perception that it's a Far Eastern phenomenon, and just a secondary market here in this half of the world. As an extension of this inaccurate simplification, each of the two regions is quite often treated as relatively homogeneous.
This too is a fallacy. The west isn't a single market. While it may be convenient to assume North America and Europe are similar, that doesn't make it so. I'm definitely more familiar with F2P here than across the pond, so to investigate the differences, I enlisted the aid of Spencer Chi, who is the Operations Manager for Aeria Games Europe. In this role, he oversees Shaiya and Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine Online in Germany, France and Turkey, and is also responsible for investigating other European territories. Before that, he worked in the US office and launched three MMORPGs in the North American market.
Read it all here.
