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by bestattack
3718 days ago
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This is very ambitious! Has there ever been an educational game of this nature that was extremely successful? Oregon Trail, Civ, etc. don't count because they do their teaching through the environment. I'm not saying it would be impossible to make something really impactful, but I'd be worried about plowing a ton of dev effort into a new platform with lots of graphics PLUS enough ESL content to make it worthwhile and actually be fun. Hmm though: I realized that English, at least written, is one of those things that people can improve at greatly through online interactions with others. Anyway, the other fear I have about this product is that it seems like "a solution looking for a problem" -- it seems like you know ESL, and you are excited about VR, and you want to combine the two. But that's not the way to create a company; you need a market demand and then design a product to fill the demand. |
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Thanks for your great questions! Questions regarding scope (ambition) are especially pertinent. Most independent games fail due to an inability to reign in their ambitions. With that in mind we're engineering this project to be both modular and scalable according to our resources. Ideally we want to create an MMORPG so that, as you've identified, players can improve their English through online interactions. At this point our players would be essentially creating content as they play! If we weren't able to raise enough money to produce an MMORPG we'd create a single-player campaign. At our most lean, we could break the RPG down into episodes, taking cues from the publishing industry. Thankfully, monetization strategies of this sort are much more flexible in Asia.
The closest comparison to a "successful" game would be to Koe (声), which attempts to teach Japanese through an RPG game. They managed to raise over $125,000 on Kickstarter (no mean feat). While they have yet to release (scope mismanagement), it does demonstrate market demand for language learning video games. Keep in mind it's estimated that there are more people learning English than speak it natively and you get an even better sense of demand.
That being said, I feel as if the market demand should already be clear; Koreans spend 15bn USD on English education with disastrous results. If we can create an educational system in which students get better test scores and don't feel compelled to kill themselves, well, that's worth something. I'm not just combining my two biggest passions, I'm combining Korea's two biggest manias: education and gaming. Korea is the world's 4th largest games consumer.
Thanks for your great questions bestattack (let me know if my answers have/haven't been sufficient)!