[MUD-Dev] BIZ: Europe & Distrubution

[Dana V. Baldwin]

Valerio Santinelli wrote:

> There already are MMOGs that can be purchased over the internet
> and played wherever you are in the world. The first that comes to
> my mind is Eve, but I'm sure there are others. Until now, the only
> real reasons I've seen for such a behaviour has been of two kinds:

>   1) Marketing: someone decided that it would be better to let
>   someone who knows the local market handle the business oversea
>   (in most cases it's even on a per-country level)

There's a lot to be said for that. Namely that there are few
publishers that have a broad base across all of the EU and interest
in small titles. Even with big titles a concurrent roll out all
across europe is a huge task. We've done well selling in Europe from
our web site using free gaming magazine trials as basically the sole
marketing move.

In general Euro publishing can be difficult because the markret size
to borders ration (business, legal and cultural) is much higher than
it is in the states or say korea. A good partner here can really
save a lot of headaches.

Billing is also an oft overlooked problem for the smaller guys. Most
Euros don't like to pay with a credit card and PayPal and Bibit
aren't exactly gems.

>   2) Localization: there still are issues with content. People in
>   Italy want to play with the game translated into Italian, which
>   means that you have to localize both the game client and all of
>   the contents, thus making the localized version incompatible
>   with the original English one.

Nah not incompatible. Difficult if not planned for in adance but the
strings can all be on the client making translations a patch
away. We run a volunteer effort that does German, Frnch, Italian and
Spanish and does it quite well. We set the english as deault and
when a localization doesn't have the proper content it shows english
until we get it replaced (in beta).

-Dana V. Baldwin
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