Pawn Takes Megabyte

"At German game shows, press and public flock to see new releases and purchase them - picture an E3 where you can buy the games you see demoed right away. The SPIEL game fest (aka "Essen") regularly grosses crowds of over 100,000 people - 151,000 in 2006! Compare that to Gen Con, the largest specialty game convention in North America, which generally tops out around 25,000. Now consider that Germany is a country with 27 percent of the population of the United States."

Tyler Sigman explains why some of this year's hottest videogames were born in Germany - on paper.

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Excellent analysis. But I have to wonder why I can never get my own family to play Settlers of Catan....

This doesn't seem any different to the Asian market with computer games though.

I've heard (from this very website) that in Asian watercooler chat rotates around games - the latest Starcraft battle, the newest Final Fantasy, etc...

In Asia, games aren't just for kids which seems to be a general feeling in the USA.

I don't mean to be facetious about War and conflict, but given these types of conclusions, maybe the USA need to lose a war or two to discover something that the Asians and Germans seem to get that we (I say We - The UK and Australia are basically the same as the USA) don't.