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 (
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 (
"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 (
Gamania, the distributor of the cash cow Lineage (
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 (
To many, Tatu City on the outskirts of Nairobi looks like a success. The first city entirely built by a private company to be operational in east Africa, with about 25,000 people living and working there, it accounts for about two-thirds of all foreign investment in Kenya. Its low-tax status has attracted more than 100 businesses including Heineken, coffee brand Dormans, and the biggest call-center and cold-chain transport firms in the region. However, to some local politicians, Tatu City has looked more like a target for extortion. A parade of governors have demanded land worth millions of dollars in exchange
An Indonesian animated movie is smashing regional box office records and could be set for wider success as it prepares to open beyond the Southeast Asian archipelago’s silver screens. Jumbo — a film based on the adventures of main character, Don, a large orphaned Indonesian boy facing bullying at school — last month became the highest-grossing Southeast Asian animated film, raking in more than US$8 million. Released at the end of March to coincide with the Eid holidays after the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, the movie has hit 8 million ticket sales, the third-highest in Indonesian cinema history, Film
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) revenue jumped 48 percent last month, underscoring how electronics firms scrambled to acquire essential components before global tariffs took effect. The main chipmaker for Apple Inc and Nvidia Corp reported monthly sales of NT$349.6 billion (US$11.6 billion). That compares with the average analysts’ estimate for a 38 percent rise in second-quarter revenue. US President Donald Trump’s trade war is prompting economists to retool GDP forecasts worldwide, casting doubt over the outlook for everything from iPhone demand to computing and datacenter construction. However, TSMC — a barometer for global tech spending given its central role in the
Alchip Technologies Ltd (世芯), an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designer specializing in server chips, expects revenue to decline this year due to sagging demand for 5-nanometer artificial intelligence (AI) chips from a North America-based major customer, a company executive said yesterday. That would be the first contraction in revenue for Alchip as it has been enjoying strong revenue growth over the past few years, benefiting from cloud-service providers’ moves to reduce dependence on Nvidia Corp’s expensive AI chips by building their own AI accelerator by outsourcing chip design. The 5-nanometer chip was supposed to be a new growth engine as the lifecycle
RSS