PC game firms ready for hot season

Shaking off lackluster summer performances, local online PC game providers are now warming up for the next major battlefield -- Christmas and winter break.

The first to join the battle is Soft-World International Corp (智冠科技), the nation's largest online game provider, which announced yesterday that its subsidiary, Game Flier International Corp (遊戲新幹線), has obtained a proxy to distribute RF Online (Racing Force Online), a popular game title developed by Seoul-based CCR Corp.

"We hope the new game will stimulate the gloomy gaming market, which has persisted since this summer," Wang Chin-po (王俊博), founder and chairman of Soft-World, said at a signing ceremony yesterday in Taipei.

RF Online, a science fiction game that allows many gamers to play at once -- also called a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) -- debuted in the South Korean market in August, and has since attracted a record 1 million gamers to register on the site, with 90,000 players online in real time.

Soft-World is scheduled to test RF Online at the end of the year, before officially unveiling the game in February in both Taiwan and Hong Kong. The launch is timed for the beginning of the school winter break.

As RF Online has been well received among South Korean gamers, Wang anticipates the game will become a successor to Soft-World's signature product Ragnarok Online (RO, 仙境傳說).

The sluggish summer has weighed on the nation's gaming industry. Soft-World reported sales of NT$247 million in July, a 18.55 percent drop from the same period last year. Smaller rival Wayi International Digital Entertainment Co (華義國際) in August saw net income dive by 65.49 percent from a year ago to NT$20 million.

Jo Lin (林怡貞), a public relations official at Wayi, said a lack of new titles resulted in the decline during the usual peak season.

To avoid a repeat effect in the next hot season -- Christmas and winter break, Wayi plans to test and introduce a series of its own games, including UE Online (Ultimate Eden Online, 羽音) and San Guo Online (鐵血三國志), instead of importing products from South Korea as most companies do, Lin said.

"South Korean games are not so powerful in the local market," Lin said, "So we want to develop our own games to cater to gamers in the greater Chinese market."

Another major game provider, Softstar Entertainment Inc (大宇資訊), has also jumped on the bandwagon of game development. The company says it has been actively storing up ammunition, designing games such as Dream of Mirror Online (飛天歷險) and Blade Online (刀劍). These are to be introduced to local gamers in the winter.