Online gaming company Gamania Digital Entertainment Co (遊戲橘子) announced yesterday its partnership with Seed Studio (喜登數位) to develop interactive game content and said it expects to release new casual game titles in the second half of next year.
Seed Studio is a leading creative game development studio with two popular games: Blue Shift and Epoch Wars. Its founder and chief executive is Wu Ji-tung (吳昕東), a second-generation member of the family that runs Shin Kong Group (新光集團).
Despite the worldwide financial tsunami, the global online gaming industry has blossomed and is projected to reach US$192 billion next year, it said.
“To seize the opportunity in Asia, we are extremely excited about our strategic alliance with Gamania and hope to roll out high-quality consumer products for avid gamers starting in the second half of next year,” Seed Studio chairman Foo Jin-hsuan (符景喧) told a media briefing yesterday.
“Gamania had been aggressively looking for suitable partners” for a long time, Gamania CEO Albert Liu (劉柏園) said. “We chose Seed Studio because it has a young research and development team, enormous creativity and innovative technology.”
Through the partnership, Gamania hopes to push its branded products not only in Taiwan, but also in China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and North America.
Seed Studio was founded in 2006 with capital of NT$140 million (US$4.24 million). The company employs 65 people and has worked with international renowned game production personnel to co-develop proprietary game engines.
Seed Studio’s client list includes Microsoft Corp and Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.
Gamania’s main rivals in Taiwan are Softworld International Entertainment Corp (智冠科技) and its subsidiary Chinese Gamer International Corp (中華網龍).
Gamania also released its audited first-half financial results.
Consolidated revenues came in at NT$2.67 billion, with an operating margin of NT$1.38 billion. Gross margin was 51.8 percent, the company said in a press statement.
Pretax and net profits reached NT$384.45 million and NT$291.94 million, up 65.04 percent and 66.64 percent respectively from the same period last year. Its net earnings per share reached NT$2.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day