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Gordon Dixon: The Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK
Peter Karboulonis: Multimedia Development Corporation, Malaysia
Introduction
The difficult task for effective global marketing is to devise a competitive product to be marketed at the right time, with the best feature benefits, that are produced at a profitable manufacturing cost. Day-to-day practical problems of such activities were isolated by Myers (1995) in his review of R.L. Sandhusen's 1994 book on Global Marketing. Bermingham (1996) also referred to the added global complexity of marketing, R&D, and manufacturing not being located in the same place. However, global marketing is being increasingly affected by changes in populations and, according to United Nations statistics, significant demographic changes in Asia.
Leisure software can be characterised into three main categories: computer games, video games and multi-player games. They consist of such interactive multimedia based products as: adventure, arcade, flight simulation, strategy, sports, shoot-em-up, fighting, and kids' games. Software is written to run on personal computers such as the IBM PC and compatibles, the Apple Macintosh and Amiga among others. Microsoft Windows is the major environment for which a large number of games are being developed. In Western Europe games titles accounted for 65 percent of all consumer CD-ROM software revenues in 1997 with 25 million titles being sold and this is expected to grow (Table I).
The video games market is considerably larger than that of the PC and targets a younger audience. There are several major platforms competing for dominance with the Sony PSX Playstation and Nintendo64 being undoubtedly the front runners. Following its December 1998 release in Japan, Sega's new games console called Dreamcast could have a significant impact.
Multi-player Games are divided into three sub-categories which support a minimum of two players at any one time: Peer-to-peer Modem Games allow two players to participate in a game over telephone lines playing against each other or as a team against the computer; PC Networked Games will typically allow 4-16 players to participate in the same game environment and will require an equal number of PCs on a Local Area Network (LAN); and Server Based Games that consist of a powerful central PC workstation serving any client machines that log into the system. The server may be on the Internet and allow...