According to Michael Fu (傅鏡暉), creative director at Joypark Webstar, a division of the Soft Star Entertainment Group, Korea currently has around 100 game software design houses releasing products, but Lineage, which has been around for four years, is now very stable and most of the bugs have been ironed out.
Fu went on to say that many of the new products released in Taiwan last year were new Korean games, which not only were rather similar in content, but also had poor systems management functions so that although Taiwan distributors spent a lot of money promoting them, they failed to make an impact.
"Stone Age has already gone through two new editions, and incorporated new maps and character types. Although this has made the game more complex, cutting into the number of return players in Taiwan, it has met with great success in China, even surpassing the Chin Yung games," said a marketing manager for Waei.
According to the Market Information Center of the Institute for Information Industry, the total value of Taiwan's online games market was NT$1.7 billion, and this year the value is likely to rise up to NT$3 billion. Conversely, the market value of stand-alone games (including imported games distributed in Taiwan) has seen the first negative growth in 10 years. These figures, not surprisingly, are spurring companies to even greater efforts on the online market.
The games themselves, unlike the fancily packaged expensive stand-alone games, are sold at a relatively cheap price, or in some cases are given away free with purchase of Web site membership, with the profit being derived from people spending long periods logged into the game Web sites.
An interesting sidelight on this catch that emerged in Taiwan is the use of software patches to speed up the progress of character development in the game. Instead of taking a couple of months of game time -- which means hundreds of hours of logged time at the game Web site -- players in Taiwan have developed ways of fast forwarding the action, so that a character can rise in levels of ability many times faster than the game designers imagined.
According to Antonio Lu (呂維振), senior editor of the Gamebase Web site, game consoles are also following the online trend including Sony's PS2 and Microsoft's Xbox. "Moreover, Japan's Square company's Final Fantasy XI will be released as an online edition, and this is likely to be one of the hottest sellers for this year."
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