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5 trends in Chinajoy 2012

August 3rd, 2012

Chinajoy was held from the 26th to the 29th of July. We summarized the event as follows.

Large scale games

The scale of Chinese online games becomes as large as China itself. Shanda Games put 100 million Yuan (US$15.7 million) for the initial development finances into developing ‘Age of Dawn’, Diablo-like action MMORPG.

Dragon Swords from Netease, Saint Seiya Online and Swordman from Perfect World are all big name MMORPGs. Because Chinese online game market is saturated with the full of MMO games already, only the big name games could get a chance to succeed.

Western online games is flooding to China

The9 devoted its booth entirely to ‘Planetside 2’ from Sony Online Entertainment with 20vs20vs 20 PvP zone. Kongzhong also demonstrated World of Tank from Wargaming.net only at the booth. Netease contribute the half of the booth to games from Blizzard entertainment such as ‘WOW: Mist of Pandaria’, ‘Starcraft2: Heart of the swarm’, and ‘Diablo3’. Shanda Games presented RIFT as well.

A guy from Shanda Games said “Since Chinese gamer’s level has been going up high, Chinese publishers are interested in publishing major online games from abroad. It becomes as important as publishing in-house games.”

Diversity of genre

Chinese developers are trying to create games with different perspective. Since most Chinese online games were eastern style fantasy MMO only, games became sick of them.
Black Gold from Snail Games has the unique world that combines the world of fantasy and punk together.

‘Dragon Sword’ from Netease, ‘The exorcist’ from Kunlun are a few example of games with unique worlds.

Non-typical shooting games

Since Crossfire is dominating Chinese online FPS market and more than 20 TPS online games are competing in China, non-typical shooting games were introduced such as ‘Penguin Warfair’ from Snail Games, Chang-sin-gi and T-game(逆战)from Tencent.

Go Mobile

EA, China Mobile and lots of small-mid size mobile game companies were presented in Chinajoy 2012. The reason that there were so many mobile games in Chinajoy 2012 is related to the increasing population of smartphone users in China. There were more smartphone users than PC internet users.

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Posted in Asia, China

Tags: ChinaJoy FPS MMORPG mobile Online Games Shanghai TPS

Photos from Chinajoy 2012

July 30th, 2012

Chinese 2012 was held last week. So many Chinese online games was introduced to gamers. We have picked a few pictures from Chinajoy 2012. All of them were taken from foreign booths.

Chinajoy 2012 at Shanghai international Expo center

B2C Booth of Chinajoy 2012

John Smedley, President of Sony Online Entertainment, with Soon-woo Park, CEO of The9 Korea at Planetside 2 booth

Planetside2 20vs20vs20 PvP booth

World of Warcraft: Mist of Pandaria booth

Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm booth

Blizzard’s Panda folding fan was very popular

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Posted in China

Tags: 2012 ChinaJoy Mist of pandaria Online Games Planetside Shanghai starcraft world of warcraft

Archeage CBT5 is available for Korea & China

March 22nd, 2012

It is expected that not only Korean, but also Chinese gamers will have chance to join the next generation MMORPG Archeage CBT5. Tencent announced they are going to provide Chinese version of client software for CBT5 at the press conference in Beijing.. Tencent is the major online game publisher in China who is responsible for Archeage publishing in China.

Jake Song said “I think it is important to have Chinese users’ opinions. We will add Chinese style shoes, maps and events for CBT5.” He emphasized that the main ideology of Archeage is ‘Change’. The original novel for Archeage called “Firs and a hawk” will be published in Chinese as well.

Archeage’s 4^th CBT was closed on the 11^th of March. XL Games introduced the original continent and siege warfare system for the first time and added various PvE, PvP contents.

However, XL Games did not announce when CBT5 will be.

You can watch the latest Archeage teaser and additional images here

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Posted in Asia, China

Tags: ArcheAge CBT Jake Song MMORPG Tencent XL Games

Tencent becomes the worldwide publisher for SURA Online

March 21st, 2012

Tencent, the top online game publisher in China, acquires the worldwide distribution right for SURA Online. Tencent announces it at the press conference in Beijing, China. SURA Online, developed by NSE Entertainment in Korea, is Asian style fantasy action RPG that has very fast attack and defense system like we have seen at martial arts movies.

Players could choose the one of three races and have 6 different classes. 1:1 PvP in SURA Online resembles 1vs1 fighting games like Tekken from Namco. The combat emphasizes psychological aspects as well as using various combo attacks. 2:2, 3:3 PvP are different from 1:1. Players should cooperate with teammates to win.

Steven Ma, Vice President of Tencent Games, said “Best resources of China and Korea have been combined through SURA Online and become stuck together. The contract has important strategic meanings for Tencent to advance into the world online game market. We enter into the global market including Europe, North America etc with SURA Online.”

We expect Tencent Korea would publish SURA Online in Korea as well.

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Posted in Asia, China

Tags: MMORPG sura online Tencent

NCsoft’s Next Games Powered by Unreal Engine 3

March 8th, 2012

Unreal Engine 3 is going to be used for NCsoft’s next generation games. Epic Games announced yesterday that it has entered into a strategic partnership of the engine with NCsoft.

They also remarked that the single contract would be the biggest Unreal Engine license contract ever in Asia for Epic Games.

NCsoft has already worked with Epic Games for its two MMORPG <Lineage 2> and <Blade & Soul>, respectively powered by Unreal Engine 2 and 3.

“The Unreal Engine has allowed us focusing on creativity and development of <Lineage 2> and <Blade & Soul>. With our own experience of the engine, we believe that we would develop games more efficiently and take advantage of it as much as possible,” said HyungJoon Kim the director of NCsoft.