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Gamania to launch new games, add R&D staff

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CIOL Bureau
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TAIPEI, TAIWAN: Taiwanese online game company Gamania Digital Entertainment plans to launch five new self-developed games globally next year and form a strategic alliance with a Chinese rival to tap the growing market there.

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Gamania will announce the new partnership by the end of the year at the earliest, chairman and chief executive Albert Liu told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.

"We will make a big jump into China next year," Liu said on the sidelines of a digital entertainment seminar. "Our strategy on China is to look for strategic alliance with first-tier companies and we are discussing details now."

"We want to take advantage of local firms' distribution network and their stronger sales and marketing there," he said.

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Gamania is in talks with several online game companies in China, where the online game market has revenue of about T$100 billion ($3 billion) annually, Liu said but he declined to identify the potential partner.

Since bringing Korean firm NCSoft's "Lineage" online fantasy game to Taiwan about a decade ago, Gamania has picked up several million players who log on to its servers to compete against, or cooperate with, other players.

Gamania also develops games by itself and the Taiwan company has a research and development team of about 300 people, about a quarter of its total workforce. Liu said he would add at least 100 people to the team next year.

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Among the five new self-developed games that have fatter profit margins than licensed games, three to four game titles will be introduced in China and one will be launched in the United States early next year, Liu said. Besides its home market in Taiwan, Gamania offers its online world of swords and sorcery to Japan, China, Hong Kong and Korea.

Competing with Soft-World International Corp in Taiwan, Gamania booked record sales of T$1.36 billion in January-March, up 38 percent from a year ago, with net profit rising 48 percent annually to T$165 million in the same quarter.

Investors have been enthusiastic on Gamania's shares. The stock has more than doubled so far this year, outpacing the main TAIEX's 50 percent gain in the same period.

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