I was watching the Blizzard session from DICE. Toward the end the guys are talking about how the business model in Asian countries is different than the U.S. model. They said most people don't play from home, they play from public game rooms. They also said that there is not a subscription model like in the U.S., that they are on a "pay-to-play" system. Does anyone know exactly how WoW works in other countries? If the majority of WoW players are from Asian countries and they are not on subscriptions, how credible is the "10 million subscribers" figure?
Im assuming they mean like internet cafe's so its the same everywhere how they have those time cards you can buy and play at internet cafes. Maybe in America more people play at home so more people use credit cards to pay online.
WOW business model in China is like this: You buy prepaid cards that give you a set amount of time - right now, its 66 hours + change of gameplay for....I forget, 30 yuan I think? Anyway it works out to like 0.45RMB per minute...thats...6 cents a minute. There's no expiry time I think...or a pretty long one, perhaps, I haven't logged in to China Wow for a while. I don't know if they have the whole monthly thing yet - in China that is like you buy a card, and it gives you unlimited gameplay time for a month ala US WOW. Dunno if they have implemented that yet. I haven't touched it for a while - took on US WOW and never looked back. Can't stand the chinese translation of names, pretty damn bad. Don't know about WOW Taiwan, but I imagine its the same.
Edit: Perhaps I wasn't clear enough - this gameplay time you buy is added to your account - you can see how many minutes you have left at the character selection screen. So you can play from anywhere, not just your home PC or net cafe
[QUOTE="TheGTAvaccine"]I think in Korea it's exactly the same as US. (Lived in Korea for 4 years)cobrax25
I think Korea is a lot different because everyone is supposed to have a computer and access to the internet (or so I heard)
Nah, I went to Internet Cafes all the time in Korea and people were playing WoW there, because my Korean friends told me that most of the people there didnt bother buying their own PC's because they could just go to the Cafe every once in awhile.
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