While you could be forgiven for thinking consoles currently rule the UK and US, in much of the rest of the world the PC remains quite the topdog. Take South Korea and the former USSR, where the influx of Japanese consoles and American console games we enjoyed in late 1980s and early 1990s never quite happened.
For instance, South Korea’s huge game scene is thus dominated by a raft of MMOs you’ve never heard of and, famously, by old man Starcraft. Gaming is a fundamental part of Korean pop culture, finding its way into TV, celebrity, news and more – and the games in question are almost exclusively on PC. Anyone gibbering the old ‘the PC is dying’ claptrap we hear so often on the West’s online hives of scum and villainy in South Korea would be laughed out of the country. A fascinating difference between their PC gaming and ours is that much of it happens in Baangs – large web cafes that are social hubs for the nation’s youth as much as they are gaming dens.
Russia and splinter nations such as the Ukraine, meanwhile, are fairly new to their own gaming industry, but in recent years they’ve been more than making up all that time lost during the Cold War. What they lacked in development experience they most certainly have in enthusiasm and invention, coming up with astoundingly ambitious stuff like Pathologic – full of ideas but presented terribly. Of late, however, these irrepressible enthusiasts have got a few games under their belt, which is why we’ve enjoyed the excellent likes of STALKER and King’s Bounty: The Legend.
Another factor that ensures the PC’s dominance in Russia is the unbelievable prevalence of piracy – you can even find copied games for sale on the high street. While this doesn’t put any smiles on the faces of Western publishers, the PC’s platform number one over there for the time being.
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