EA, ahead of the pack of any other major game company, finally looks and sees how successful online gaming is over in Asia and decides to “experiment” with the concept of in-game transactions (a la QQ堂 or QQ itself) and in-game ads. Red Kemp notes:

The number of people playing video games online in China increased by 20% to 59 million[...]. Interestingly, a majority of these games are free-to-play.

I’m very surprised that these sites within Asia have still not tried to challenge the American market for online games to really dominate the US arena as most of the major players here are very far behind and afraid of trying different models.

Now, it may be said that the costs of creating the games and maintaining them there may be a lot cheaper than here in the US, but nonetheless if the games in China do not get on the ball in creating English versions, I can definitely see EA and later other major gaming companies establishing firm control in the US market for a long-time.