johnnyprozac

I am not surprised. I worked for the last half a decade in the Korean game industry. Though there is a lot of good things...code management was not the best. I remember that I once worked for a company which had a game it had shut down and months later some other company wanted to buy it. The thing is most of the relevant engine code was ONLY on one server which had been summarily wiped. No code vault. No offsite backups.

Documentation and production process are really sloppy. but to get nontechnical decisions done? go through 6 or 7 layers of approval. I always thought it was stupid to then not have that same kind of redundant thoroughness in regards to what is the most important part of the business.

Broken F2P models?

oh you mean Zynga? Playfish?

wait do you mean Habbo Hotel? Allods Online?Puzzle Pirates?

No no you must mean Club Penguin. Or Fusionfall.

Ahh...you must mean Dungeon & Dragons Online.

Or essentially any current Gamevil, ngmoco game? (ok 99 cents but that's due to App store policy)

Yup all broken. groping around. *rolls eyes*

well at least one thing should come out of this entire thing: blog journalism needs to stop hyping things and then stop being mad at the subject of that hype when a product does not live up to the hype that the company itself did not in any way hype up by itself.

journalism. *sigh* this tablet coverage was not an indictment against apple but onlien journalism itself.

Hell look at Joystiq take Calcanais' joke seriously when he telegraphed the joke on TWiT a full week before the event. I mean come on..it was so obviously a joke but Joystiq and a number of outlets took it seriously WITHOUT CHECKING IT OUT.

number one rule of journalism: check your damn story against other sources and hell past practices.

when has apple ever let anyone beta test something? why have facial recognition AND fingerprint scanning? a tivo PVR?

and hell did anyone even bother to check out Calcanais past appearances anywhere like on TWiT..where they were joking about accelerometer enhanced Farmville AND Bejeweled?

was there anything anywhere to support any of that?

which is why none of anyof this should be considered news and more or less entertainment.

I really think we have to stop using NPD as a yardstick for any meaningful data in the PC space because the business models have so significantly changed. I would argue that NPD data does not reflect 40 to 50% of the entire PC games market. It fails even worse when we look at the total global market.

The total global market show actual increasing pc games sales in emerging markets who ironically are increasingly getting better network infrastructure and better telco business models than the horrible US network which then reflects in the increasing number of online sales elsewhere in the world.

I would argue that even if NPD had a global presence they would still be useless because most emerging markets have game sales online rather than in packaged form. From Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador and the South American markets to China, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, China, and the Japanese markets; more games are being sold and operated online than through retail packaging.

Worldwide, I would argue that the PC is growing and thriving faster than consoles because the expenditure is more easily justified and the platform much more prevalent. With the online infrastructure more robust as well, pc sales are doing better outside of the US.

I think its lazy of journalists, new sites, and these "professional" commentators to keep using what is clearly an outdated and narrow data source.

Yes I know...I still don't know what possesed some of the Producers at those companies to think that some of their "replacement" main characters were a good idea especially since some of these franchises are clearly built upon the appeal of these characters.

Oh wait I forgot...the same thought process that keeps some of your bankable elements of a game locked

You know...I agree with Yahtzee...

And here we see the nintendo defense force....with Mario stuck up your nether and you smoking Yoshi's ether...

no....unlockable charactersin most fighting games are either clones with different costumes, peripheral characters..BUT YOU DO NOT KEEP YOUR FREAKIN MAIN CHARACTERS LOCKED!

Think would it make sense to have CHun Li or Ryu be locked characters in Street Fighter? or Any one of the bouncing juggly female ninjas in Dead or Alive?

It would be like playing Metal Gear Solid without Solid Snake. I mean what kind of idiots do that? Or Sonic game without Sonic....I mean do you want your games to be freaking disappointing??? (This was a sarcastic rhetorical question for those of you lacking the ability to comprehend what your read)

OOOOH...we have the requisite "I am a Brawl artiste and nun of dis booton mahsin weel bete meee!" Hello. you are compensating for something. repeat after me "Your self esteem is not centered around the ability you have to make Princess Peach hump Wario into submission" You. Are. Loved. by. You. and I don't mean with a kleenex and a skin mag.

Like Engadget with its cult of Latter Day Apple Saints...hoping to be in the position of being Steve Jobs early adopter human toilet paper just so they can be in the presence and be smeared with his offal...and then thrown away when he figures out it would be better just to stick money up his hole

I sense Nintendo is the sacred cow here in which if anyone dares to tip it and point out that there is manure that comes out...people here will still protest voraciously of it as chocolate honey honey milk and stuff themselves full of that brown gooeyness.

I apologize on behalf of all Koreans for our...

1)...uh annoying Starcraft obsession...which has now spawned multimillion tournaments televised on TV in stadiums and entire teams owned by corporations
2) ...grindfest MMORPG's.....who seem to share the same damn generic interface, graphical engine, and monotonous quest types. Oh and really stupid background stories and quasi fantasy backgrounds. Except some have wings. and some are naked.

3)...for dividing the western games industry between those who are for and agaisnt microtransaction based item mall games....making moolah but having shitty customer support because well in Korea, it ain't any better.

4)..having faster internet connections than most anywhere else in the world for about 20 bucks a month...to diluge the rest of the world with spam spam spam SPAM SPAM SPAM!!

5) for soup alle dog.

6) for this long list. and Japan. Because the Japanese, with the exception of the Ainu are really descended from Koreans. So then we indirectly apologize for Pokemon. and Hello Kitty World.

Neither.

APB!

THe Korea Times is famous in Korea for its complete and continuous lack of journalistic credibility. There is no fact checking nor is there really any editing either.

Korean Herald isn't much better either...its like the Fox News of newspapers here in Korea ...which leaves many expats, english speakers and others here not really reading either newspaper unless forced to.

I am not surprised by how skewed the article is.

NCSOft is huge news here in Korea as is Webzen...etc. Wheras Webzen is actually in trouble...with hostile takeover attempts, declining Mu revenue, and etc.. NCSoft isn't.

Hell...if they were in trouble..exactly why would they be ramping up the NCSoft Europe office?

Webzen is publishing APB.....and it is very much past pre-production...should see some news coming in early 2008

You'll see Huxley news before then..in fact closed beta's are being run right now in Korea.