Online gaming market booming, at least now

The market for online PC games will hit NT$9.2 billion this year, up from NT$6.87 last year and will leapfrog to NT$15 billion by 2006, a report issued by local research house Market Intelligence Institute (市場情報中心) said yesterday.

Among various games in the market, massive multiplayer online role-playing games were rated the most popular category and are expected to continue dominating the market in the next few years, the report said.

However, the local online gaming market is nearing the saturation point, judging from the flattening growth curve over the past few years, said Lin Yu-sheng (林于勝), the report's author.

Citing the center's statistics, Lin said that the market grew 140 percent from 2001 to 2002, 69 percent from 2002 to last year and is estimated to increase just 24 percent from last year to this year.

Given the growth limits of the domestic market Lin suggested gaming companies expand their sale of original works across the Taiwan Strait, or to other Chinese-speaking regions.

Currently, about 70 percent of online games distributed in this country come from South Korea, while home-made ones account for less than 10 percent of the market. The local gaming industry has long been keen to break through this inequality.

Major players such as Soft-World International Corp (智冠 科技), the nation's largest online game provider, and smaller rival Gamania Digital Entertainment Co (游戲橘子), face the same tough competition in seeking to expand into the massive Chinese market.

"Taiwanese gaming companies seeking to break into the Chinese market must come up with their own games to distinguish themselves from [South] Korean and Chinese games, which have already taken a large slice of the market," Lin said.

South Korean gaming developers have issued distribution rights to Chinese gaming companies, while Beijing has regulations to protect its own industry, leaving Taiwanese companies little room to maneuver, he noted.

Lin, therefore, suggested local companies shift the battlefield to Southeast Asia, where the online gaming sector is just beginning to grow.

Soft-World has already made the leap. It set up operations in Singapore and Malaysia and swept Southeast Asia with its killer product Ragnarok Online (仙境 傳說), a South Korean game that it holds distribution rights to. It announced last month that it is considering joint ventures with gaming companies in Thailand to exploit the market in that country.

Gamania, the distributor of the cash cow Lineage (天堂) series, plans to remain focused on the Chinese market, since it wants to develop more games itself, said Heidi Chang (張海平), a Gamania public relations official.

The company said last month that it hopes to see its own games grow to account for half of its releases in the next five years. Its biggest hopes are pinned on its new game San Ma Do (仙魔道), which was tested in Beijing early this year and is scheduled to be released at the end of this year or early next year, Chang said.