[TRENCHES] Tuesday, December 31, 2013 - Interviewers Like You

Geth

Interviewers Like You
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/interviewers-like-you

Moon and Stars

Anonymous

In 2007, I was working for a company that had then recently acquired the license to operate a certain MMO in a certain part of the Asia region. As newly hires, we were all worked up because the company who granted us the license (after some from what I heard were fierce but enthusiastic negotiations) was well known and respected.

We had such high hopes and we were so ever optimistic. As the tone of my story may suggest, that in fact did not last. That point of view did a 180 degree reversal and stuck there.

We weren’t meeting the required number of concurrent users (CCU) we promised. Execs were baffled, there was a lot of tedious and ego shrinking management committee meetings to which sometimes underlings
like myself were required to attend.

But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was being asked questions linked to low CCU’s and when given the honest to goodness truth, getting berated at it for it. Even if it wasn’t our fault.

To make the long story short, all that angst that was pointed to us at operations actually rightfully belongs to marketing and management themselves. It became clear and even years after the fact, the truth remained clear. They overpromised impossible CCU numbers from that region without considering technological barriers of would be customers and underdelivered overblown expectations to the company that granted the license.

They didn’t account for cultural differences and language barriers that turned off some of the player base. (HINT: Not all Southeast Asian countries speak English, and not all of them speak Chinese. So what happens when you get a demographic that cannot communicate to each other but instead stick to their own language?)

Furthermore, these are developing countries, not first world class. The technical requirements of the game far exceed the standard specs of what you would normally see, and high end gaming specs are not the norm. It’s there and available, but not a lot own that range of requirements. In addition, some of these countries had low internet reliability (high lag) and some even less internet penetration (at least as of 2007).

Lastly, my company partnered with an overseas firm to handle the marketing to those countries with Chinese as the main language. Smart on paper, not so smart in reality. These firms overseas had their own brand of MMOs operating in the same region as well. They are OUR competitors. Would you trust a competitor to FAIRLY represent and advertise your product in those regions just because you can’t speak Chinese?

But no of course not. Blame the rank and file of CSR’s for pulling unpaid overtime for not reaching a mark that was impossible to reach to begin with and not marketing who clearly did not do enough marketing research and activities, and certainly not top management who promised the moon and the stars but knew not how to build a spaceship.

Ori Klein

I think we know how that story ended up.