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 (
DIVIDED VIEWS: Although the Fed agreed on holding rates steady, some officials see no rate cuts for this year, while 10 policymakers foresee two or more cuts There are a lot of unknowns about the outlook for the economy and interest rates, but US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell signaled at least one thing seems certain: Higher prices are coming. Fed policymakers voted unanimously to hold interest rates steady at a range of 4.25 percent to 4.50 percent for a fourth straight meeting on Wednesday, as they await clarity on whether tariffs would leave a one-time or more lasting mark on inflation. Powell said it is still unclear how much of the bill would fall on the shoulders of consumers, but he expects to learn more about tariffs
NOT JUSTIFIED: The bank’s governor said there would only be a rate cut if inflation falls below 1.5% and economic conditions deteriorate, which have not been detected The central bank yesterday kept its key interest rates unchanged for a fifth consecutive quarter, aligning with market expectations, while slightly lowering its inflation outlook amid signs of cooling price pressures. The move came after the US Federal Reserve held rates steady overnight, despite pressure from US President Donald Trump to cut borrowing costs. Central bank board members unanimously voted to maintain the discount rate at 2 percent, the secured loan rate at 2.375 percent and the overnight lending rate at 4.25 percent. “We consider the policy decision appropriate, although it suggests tightening leaning after factoring in slackening inflation and stable GDP growth,”
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
RSS