3 Days A Game! Clone Games Scattered All Around Online Game Market

We can say that the Chinese and Korean online game markets, which are considered as the capital "harbors", have achieved great success in the global financial crisis. Recently, Analysis International has issued a survey, which shows that the Chinese online game market earned a total of RMB6.179 billion in 2nd quarter of 2009. Great countries of MMORPGs don't make concession but continuously strengthen their global strategies. For example, AIKA has recently announced to enter the South American market.

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However, the rapid market expansion also causes the general situation among the online game enterprises, that is, games are always developed with three common features - "short development duration, unimpressive game features and benefits-oriented operation". As someone in the online game industry who's unwilling to present his name said, most game companies had started to import Korea-made games for the sake of developing clone games.

A new game can be cloned within 3 days after its launch.

According to a game enthusiast who's also a junior, the current so-called online games are just something evolved from old online games with a new coat, e.g. modifying character appearances, endowing a specific skill or class with a different name and calling "raising pets" as "feeding daughters" instead, while PK and leveling up are the only gameplay. Equipping the best gears is always players' goal.

The game enthusiast can also tell whether a newly launched online game will become popular in the future just by playing it for less than 10 minutes. According to him, the current online games are quite similar to each other with only some minor differences in art design, which can usually be found by players.

In the opinion of insiders from the online game industry, Chinese and Korean online gamers like the above game enthusiast are just passing through the hard time of so-called "clone".

Someone in charge of a game company expressed that similar to Korean pickled vegetables, many different online games brought players just the same feeling, no matter what their brands were and when players enjoyed them. From his point of view, as the online game industry grew drastically, it is the lack of creative ideas and development talents that leads to such situation.

According to insiders, lots of online game operators just develop new games simply by adjusting the original codes and pictures featured in the previous successful online games, and launch them by giving them new names. In the current online game market, the game can even be cloned within 3 days after its launch.

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The original Heroes of Might and Magic Online is cloned by crowds of browser games, and there is also an Aion-clone browser game – Neverend.

Tycoons are also involved in the "clone" crisis.

Affected by the current situation, leading game producers like NCsoft and Nexon from South Korea and Shanda and Perfect World from China are also being challenged by the "clone" crisis.

NCsoft's Aion has been facing various crises since its launch. And there're still no effective solutions to the problems like "no new gameplay except for nice graphics", "poor server capability" and "unsatisfactory customer service".

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