Online game publisher Gamania Digital Entertainment Co (遊戲橘子) yesterday signed a contract with Daewon Media Co and Rainfall Soft Co of South Korea for the Taiwan distribution rights to the Crayon Shin-chan Online game.
Crayon Shin-chan is a popular Japanese manga that has a wide following in Taiwan. The deal marks the first time that Gamania is acting as an agent for an online game product.
“We chose to break into the online game [agency] market by selling the popular Crayon Shin-chan Online as our first product and believe it will bring Taiwanese online game players a completely different kind of entertainment experience,” Gamania chief executive officer Vincent Chuang (莊成志) told a press conference yesterday.
Photo: CNA
The new game is scheduled to hit the market in July, he said.
Garmania public relations officer Kimberly Lin (林昭君) said Daewon Media and Rainfall Soft were authorized by the Japanese manga publisher of the Crayon Shin-chan manga series to use the character in their Crayon Shin-chan Online game product in 2010.
The game hit South Korean stores last year, and Daewon Media and Rainfall Soft said they discovered that teenagers aged 10 to 14 and adults in their 30s were their two largest customer groups.
“Based on Daewon Media and Rainfall Soft’s survey, we believe Crayon Shin-chan Online will be a popular parent-child online game after it goes on sales in Taiwan,” Lin said by telephone.
Chuang said Gamania plans to introduce about eight to nine gaming products this year and has begun developing games for mobile devices to catch up with other firms in the growing online game market.
Currently, Gamania’s customers can access many of the company’s game products through its Web site “beanfun!”
By the end of this quarter, Gamania will launch a new mobile app under the same name for Google Inc’s Android and Apple Inc’s iOS operating systems devices.
Gamania reported NT$7.09 billion in consolidated revenue last year, up 0.53 percent from NT$7.05 billion a year ago. It reported a net loss per share of NT$1.11 in the first three quarters of last year, compared with earnings per share of NT1.2 in the same period a year earlier.
For this quarter, Chuang said sales were expected to grow from last quarter, thanks to its new games Bubble Fighter and Dimension Online.
Gamania’s shares closed down 0.18 percent at NT$27.50 yesterday, outpacing the broader market, which dropped 0.83 percent.
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