Gamers find their thrills online

Playing games against your computer is increasingly becoming a thing of the past, with numerous local game software companies pouring money into the creation of online games which allow players to interact in virtual worlds of their own creation. The trend has pushed online gaming such as Chinesegamer Web site and Joypark, into the ranks of the most profitable and highly valued e-commerce sites operating in Taiwan.

Streamlining their operations in response to this trend, companies such as Third Wave Publishing (第三波), Waei (華義), Soft-World (智冠) and Chinasoft (華彩) are downsizing or merging their stand-alone gaming departments to concentrate resources in online games, which has much greater profit-making potential.

Online gaming first made an impact on the Taiwanese market with King of Kings released by Chinasoft in 1999 and with the introduction of Ultima Online. Initially, given the considerable complexity of the games, they were the exclusive preserve of hard-core gamers, many of whom had been following developments overseas through BBS sites. Online gaming, with its roots in Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) role-playing games, allow for the creation of virtual worlds that continue to evolve even when players are taking time off from playing -- one of the catches that keeps people hooked online.

Unlike games such as Counter Strike and Quake, the number of people who can inhabit the virtual world of the game is virtually infinite and becomes quite literally a gaming community.

When Interplay released its Everquest series in 1999, the game received much media attention, but the complexity of the games and the lack of a Chinese-language interface continued to restrict the online games to a dedicated group of role-playing game addicts.

It was not until 2000 when Waei introduced the Japanese game Stone Age (石器時代) that online gaming broke out from its geekish enclave and spread to a wider public. Its avoidance of the swords-and-sorcery scenario meant that it had appeal to both female and male players. Moreover, the relative ease of play also attracted people who had previously used BBS sites to discuss relationships and other matters. This shift encouraged Taiwanese companies to establish their own gaming Web sites.

The following year, Gamania released Lineage (天堂), a game that had been developed in Korea, although published by Gamania Digital Entertainment. Korean games, with their stricter adherence to D&D RPG conventions -- characters assume one of a number of professions such as swordsman or magician and go out into the world finding adventure, killing monsters, finding treasure and rising in skill level -- are distinct from the softer Japanese games such as Stone Age which are more in the tradition of the Pikachu animation series that emphasizes daily life over superhero adventure. Of the top six online games in Taiwan at present, all but one -- JY Online (金庸群俠傳) were developed in either Korea or Japan.

Lineage entered the Taiwan market in a flurry of celebrity-driven media hype and immediately attracted a player base of 400,000 members and continues to be one of the most popular online games on the market, commanding high licensing fees.

"Although Lineage has a relatively high level of difficulty, it is still easier than Stone Age and was therefore able to broaden the online gamer player base even further. With its effective marketing, it was able to grab a big slice of the market," Chen Chih-ho (陳致豪) of Gamebase Web site (遊戲基地網站), a gamer information Web site, said.