By Alex Villafania, hackenslash Reporter
INQUIRER.net
ASIAN MEDIA, which publishes the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Lineage II, promises to make big splashes in early 2008.
In particular is the commercialization of Lineage II, which has been in open beta since July this year. The company will also launch in the first quarter of 2008 the Kamael update of Lineage II, which is expected to introduce a new race of characters.
In line with the early year plans of Asian Media for Lineage II is the upcoming single of the winners of their Game Girls competition. A Lineage II-inspired music video will also feature the five-person Game Girls.
Asian Media partnered with record label Sony BMG Philippines for the Game Girls competition. The winning Game Girls, who follow the same concept as the widely popular all-girl dance troupe Pussycat Dolls, will become part of the marketing strategy of Asian Media for its games, as well as become Sony BMG talents.
In an interview Asian Media chief operating officer Ronald Allan Aquino said the company is prepared for 2008, expanding the current games they are publishing as well as introducing new games after Lineage II goes commercial.
Aquino declined to go into the details of the new games they plan to launch in the Philippines, but noted that one will be an online role-playing game and another a casual game.
“We’re focusing all our efforts now with Lineage II, which is showing a lot of promise since the start of the beta testing,” Aquino said.
He said the Philippines has the most number of players in the game, accounting for about 80 percent of the total. Other markets where the game is played are Malaysia and Singapore.
“There are approximately 300, 000 Filipinos playing the game and about 60, 000 from Malaysia and Singapore,” Aquino said.
He also revealed that Asian Media has commissioned a third-party survey on their game’s popularity.
The study, done by a local research company called Frames, surveyed 109 online game players from at least 10 Internet cafes in Metro Manila. The survey, which started in mid-October until the first week of November, revealed that Lineage II was the second most-played online game in Internet cafes.
“Of course, it comes as a surprise because we expected the newer titles from the other publishers to be the first in the list because they came right after we did. It just shows that this game has so much more potential,” Aquino said.
Earlier this year, Asian Media went into an exclusive partnership with Lineage II South Korean developer NCsoft to publish and market the game in the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia for a sum of $5.5 million.
15 Feedbacks on "Asian Media maps out plans for early 2008"
reimaru
funny they say L2 is the 2nd largest but majority of the players that are playing in the u-belt area are RF online and ragnarok…can you provide us the website of the research group to check the survey?
barilbarialn
actually, majority i’ve seen play WarRock, perfect world & ran online. the only thing L2 has majority of are posters.
Tristan
@reimaru
The survey was done in areas where freeplays have been conducted and just about a week or 2 from the date of the freeplay.
Further, this is the only game i know of that supports the use of bots. If im not mistaken they are not going to do any gameguard update regarding the bot until February or March 2008.
Last, professional players of lineage (those that played the inernational version) are into buying adenas which is the ingame currency. The game provides a quest wherein you get a hundred thousand adenas during your early levels. Create 10 characters and youd have earned yourself 500pesos.
drunkenmonkey
Funny you should mention a game that allows the use of bots. Isn’t that what the first bot-infested MMORPG in the Philippines (Ragnarok Online) was about?
Lets not even talk about the RMT side of RO especially in the early days.
If I’m not mistaken too, bots still roam freely in various RO servers.
lol.
reimaru
woah!!! they support bots?…no wonder many players are searching for L2 bots in the net ^^
i think the bot issue in L2 is worst than RO and granado espada combined
and i heard they still have no game cards in the market
tagapamahala
@reimaru
where are you from? let me refresh your memory by checking out this link.
http://services.inquirer.net/print/print.php?article_id=5895
Tristan
Load will be available by January 2008.
The original plan was for a 20 peso load for 1 whole day unlimited gameplay. But i hear they have plans to increase that to 2 days.
jercouzen
@ reimaru
LOL stop being gullible.. use of bots is against the terms of service.. it’s quite the opposite actually.. they ban so many bots that there are a few non-botters who get caught in the crossfire..
so no, L2 SEA doesn’t tolerate botting..
and really, no use comparing RO and GE to L2.. it’s like comparing a box-type corolla to 12 cylinder aston martin..
@ tristan
as for the 100k reward noob quest (Kamael), they blocked that 1st day of open beta.. so no, it cannot be exploited.. the elf version takes much a longer time to complete thus not making worth the effort for 10 chars..
and why did you point out 500 pesos instead of 1 mil adena? LOL.. using RMT to bash is useless as it is more rampant in RO and the common F2P games in the Phil..
just be happy we have a world class game hosted locally.. international gamers like me no longer have to put up with 300ms latency just to play in NA..
my only concern is that i hope the base pinoy gaming community will mature fast enough to deal with an international community..
Ancient
I get to see a lot of gamers playing DotA rather than L2. lmao
L2 anyone? I rather play GW.
Silent
no more ran online now^^ run will be soon burried deep^^ 2moons will rock
the world i guess! nice graphics and nice
marketing^^
endlesone
@Jercouzen nice one to finally correct these misconceptions that these guys have regarding Lineage 2 SEA (if i remember it right this also happened to one other game that AMDG released here in that a certain company just keeps on giving out wrong information regarding Guild Wars)
@Ancient i’d rather play either Lineage 2 or Guild Wars than RO or GE
net_pilgrimdane
@tagapamahala nice one to actually remind him about that press release and article
drunkenmonkey
There are more people playing DotA in the Philippines than any other locally published MMORPG.
Why? Because DotA is free and there are no hidden costs found in F2P games.
DTA
Like everyone else in the country looking for freebies, you’re still freeloading. XD
piracy
DOTA is technically not free since cafes should actually purchase an original copy of warcraft. Thing is, most of the installed copies you see are pirated. Candidate for a next raid after the Windows OS raids
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