As for stoned rats helping with mind control? I don’t know, that’s a good question, and I’m fairly sure someone in China has the answer. A heavily stoned rat would be less likely to make conflicting demands, but from what I know about the electrode brain stimulus tech, it wouldn’t matter too much. The idea started over in the US and spread from here by a professor seeking to “help” people with epilepsy and severe seizures. The first successful human test being the ability to stimulate a calm peaceful guitar wielding epilictic woman into a mad rage where she attempted to use the instrument as a deadly projectile against the professor’s colleague. He dodged it, but the result was both shocking and fascinating. He continued this technology and it’s in use today, the chinese have simply worked out the mapping for a rats brain (and by some facsimile and testing, perhaps a human brain) to wire it to respond to RC Car controls.

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China is a product of the greed and desire to be “green” the rest of the world wrestles with. Case in point, they can’t export if we don’t buy.

Still, more people playing coh is a good thing. Not all bad eh? *sighs*

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About 13 years ago, they never used cars as far as I could see, and I saw them daily so… but they instead used horse and buggies. Kids walked to school. Then they began to use roller skates a year later to get to school, now I commonly see them with old used trucks, the adults anyway, though the buggies remain almost as prevalent. They’ve been forced to used pasteurization on dairy products they produce, which led to the introduction of electrical lighting to many of their homes.

In terms of shear numbers China’s potential gaming population is comparable, though still lower than the US and Europe. China’s economy is growing mostly due to unrestricted industry, which is polluting it’s rivers, flooding it’s valleys and filling their air with noxious fumes. Olympic competitors didn’t even attend the one to two months prior training session in China because of the pollution, in stead arriving the week of the event having trained before going. Technology advances in some areas, such as medicine and electronics, but this technology is more of an export than a China use product. They assemble many computer parts and circuit boards, but this doesn’t mean the assembly line workers own computers. Some recent advances from China: the launch of their own space program (in progress), the furthering of brain-electronic stimulus triggers (IE the Remote Controlled rat) and the study of cannabis compounds in super-concentrated levels (a compound more than 100 times more concentrated than Marijuana resulted in Brain growth in mice, though it didn’t make them more intelligent, but more relaxed, har har)

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Collectivist culture is besides the point when the games industry is still a large industry in China. Your comparison to the Amish is particularly disingenuous (The Chinese people don’t shun technology, grief).

You also have missed the point with regards to the game being tailored to the Chinese market. It’s not just a language issue, the product itself is tailored for the Chinese market, and this is not just a question of printing CD’s, the actual infrastructure takes a lot of investment to set up and maintain. It’s a persistent online game with a micro-transaction based system. That IS how it’s tailored for the Chinese market. Company of Heroes was designed and released in the Western market as a stand-alone product. This model does not work well in China for reasons already discussed, so instead they’ve used a model which has already proven popular in the country and as such has a much greater chance of succeeding. This is a model that has not taken off here to nearly the same extent that it has in far Eastern developed nations like China and South Korea, and it’s a risky investment in its own right. To release a similar product in the Western market only increases the risk for a product that was essentially already available in a different format three years ago here. That said, if the model can be shown to be popular here (which is likely at least part of the incentive for Relic showing gamers here how to access it), then there’s an obvious market for it and Relic can create an infrastructure for their persistent online game here. Until that’s proven however, this is a move by Relic to tap a market that hasn’t been tapped previously. Think of it in the opposite manner: Relic aren’t avoiding the Western market with this product, they’re investing in an attempt to enter into a new one. Which is a very large risk for a relatively small company like Relic (they’re already facing enough financial difficulties after Company of Heroes didn’t sell the numbers they’d hoped, and as such even resulted in a scaling back of production values on Dawn of War 2) and it would be a much greater risk for a lower promised return if they had to invest in creating and maintaining the infrastructure for it to be played here.

Relic’s current business model is to try and expand their market because at the moment, the RTS market has currently plateaued, if not actually in decline (we’ll see what happens when SC2 hits, but that’s another issue). It’s the driving decision behind things like the new gameplay structure of their titles, and entering new markets. However such investments are freaking huge and risky, there’s no point in expanding the scope of them to include markets where there’s far less likelihood of success for the designed model for no good reason. They don’t even know whether CoH online is going to be successful in China, making the kind of a huge investment into making it a global system would be crazy until the case can first be proven. So that’s what they’re going to do.

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http://images.mmosite.com/news/2008/12/25/1183025478513.jpg

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Gaming in the coastal region is big for a few reasons, one of which, is because it’s a way of making money, gold farming, though IIRC that’s illegal now, but it won’t stop. Beyond that, it’s a collectivist culture where the individual is valued under the group, usually, which makes some people feel homogenized, and video games offer the ability to make a virtual representation that is unique and does things on their own for themselves, in a virtual world. Virtual individuality can be addicting, yes.

As for tailoring to the Chinese Market, I see no difference beyond the text; there’s nothing remarkably Chinese about CoH Online as far as we can tell, though it’s a limited perspective because we only have sparse trailers to rely on.

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I agree with Subediii 100%

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I mean we’re dealing with a nation that has an extremely sparse number of computer users in it’s overall population, much less, gamers.

Are you kidding me? Do you have ANY idea how huge online gaming is in China? To the extent that the government’s been having to enact legislation to moderate gaming in net cafe’s and try to curb game addiction? Yeah OK the Chinese government oversteps its bounds on a lot of issues, but nonetheless it’s a very large industry. Seriously, read up a little on the topic before making that kind of presumption. At the very least I’d suggest going to google and hitting up “gaming in China” for a few news articles.

As for being allowed to play this game, it’s Relic themselves that actually gave information on how we could sign up and join in. This is an iteration primarily designed around the Chinese market. However odds are that if it proves popular with western gamers, then they’ll likely make an official version for this market as well. The reason they pushed CoH to China is because there was such huge piracy (i.e. interest) from that region. The reason they use a persistent online, micropayment transaction driven system in China is because piracy is so rampant there, but also because this is the model that Chinese gamers are intrinsically familiar with from the vast amount of other persistent online games played there.

It’s a product designed around a specific market, and designed to take advantage of an opportunity for a market that’s largely ignored by most Western developers. It’s a risk, but it’s also a very perceptive move.

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