Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | February 2009 14 Soft Target Media companies are keen to capitalise on America’s online betting ban The Middle Way Mahjong and other traditional Asian games offer a half way housebetween ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ gaming I n the United States there are media companies targeting soft gaming products at the ethnic Asian population, which currently stands at around 13.5 million people, or 4.43% of the total, according to the CIA World Factbook . Any US-delivered content would need to avoid falling foul of the federal government’s ban on Internet gambling. Nonetheless a business model adopting subscription- based games or play for fun with advertising and aimed at Asian players could be an interesting alternative to offshore online gaming products. Target business In August last year the Indian media business Reliance Entertainment reported it was trying to buy a US company specialising in mobile phone-delivered game content. Reliance, part of the Reliance Group headed by the Indian entrepreneur Anil Ambani, said it was tracking the target company via Reliance’s US vehicle Jump Games, based in Chicago. A company spokesman said the idea was to provide content including animated games, to US telecoms companies, with a particular focus on appealing to non- resident Indians and Asians living in the US. S ales of avatars as a secondary form of soft gaming revenue have proved particularly popular in the Korean market and at least one online content provider there is on record saying it makes a better margin on sales of avatars than it does on its online subscription poker. “Avatar sales are a distinctive feature of the Korean market,” says Shailesh Naik, Managing Director of CryptoLogic Asia Pacific. “We make a better margin on avatar sales than we do on the game play.” “Poker margins are becoming increasingly complicated and competitive,” adds his colleague Ken Crouse. “In Korea players are also dressing up their avatars—buying a hat, or even buying an avatar girlfriend or boyfriend. All these little things are generating revenue for the site.” F or those content providers or site operators determined to target the China market, there are distinctively Chinese pastimes such as mahjong that occupy the middle ground between hard and soft gaming. There are already tens of millions of people playing mahjong offline in China either betting among themselves in small private games at home, or playing for fun in organised associations across China. Last year CryptoLogic invested in the online games company Mahjong Time. “We’re very excited about the Mahjong Time deal for several reasons,” says Ken Crouse. Convergence “One is that mahjong might be the ultimate game for convergence. We’ve all been waiting for the mahjong market to take off for a number of years and we all hear about the hundreds of millions of players that love to play the game in China. It’s a national pastime for a variety of reasons. Some people bet on it for cash like a poker game, and other people play for the community experience. “One of our bets on mahjong is not that it’s going to be the game of choice for gamblers, but that it might be so popular with community play that it then creates a space for all the other products.” Higher Plane Avatar sales are an online gaming phenomenon in Korea Cover Story