AION: Good start in Japan
Posted: July 9th, 2009, by Yunho ChungAION In Japan
Korean Companies are confident in their ability to leverage cultural proximity and their deep insights into Asian market to enter Japan, still quite resistant to western giants such as Facebook or Google. For instance, the Korean search portal Naver is currently under beta-test in Japan to challenge Yahoo local domination.
Today’s focus highlights NCSOFT’s attempt to convert Japanese player to Massively-Multiplayer Online Games ( MMOG ) with its new hit, “Aion : the Tower of Eternity”. The Open Beta-test started on Tuesday (7th), after a successful Closed Beta-test.
Japan is well-known to be a desert for MMOG despite its huge gaming market size , the 3rd in the world. Even the game of all records World of Warcraft didn’t dare make its move in this difficult console-oriented environment and cautiously stayed away. However, up to 40 000 simultaneous users played on the first day of Open Beta-test on Aion’s 8 servers.
The game was launched last fall in Korea and later in China and will be deployed on September 22-25 in Europe and USA. The Collector’s Edition is already sold out in many UK stores ( see Amazon.uk for example ), due to a positive buzz during beta-test.
Japanese trailer :
Video provided by video.mmosite.com
