Level Up! earns P77M in net revenues from online games

By Erwin Oliva INQUIRER.net THE RESURGENCE of interest of the online gaming community in a five-year-old game boosted revenues of local online game publisher Level Up! Philippines during the first quarter of 2008, a top executive told hackenslash. Level Up! CEO Jane Walker confirmed in a telephone interview that the company earned about P77 million in net revenues during the first quarter of 2008. In an earlier financial briefing, executives of ePLDT, the Internet subsidiary of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT), reported that the online gaming service revenues of Level Up! Philippines grew by 27 percent to P77 million. Walker said gross revenues of Level Up! Philippines, however, have reached more than P100 million, despite the closure of several online games in 2007 and this year. Level Up! Philippines pulled the plug on Rose Online in 2007, and Khan and PangYa this year. Khan was taken out after its developers stopped supporting the game. PangYa was seen to have not generated much interest from local players, said Walker. "[PangYa] was not a profitable game. We didn't believe in the longevity of the game in the Philippines," she said. To date, Level Up! now runs five online games, namely Ragnarok, RF Online, Flyff, Freestyle, and Perfect World. Walker said two more online games are set to be released this year. One will be a "high-traffic" game that will be announced in two weeks, she said. Walker declined to comment on whether the local game publisher remains the leading company in the market. But she pointed out that Level Up! has seen about 50,000 stable concurrent users every month, and close to a million active users. With the holding of the Ragnarok World Championship in the Philippines in October, Walker said the interest in the five-year-old game is at its highest again, following a slump. "It also helped that we introduced free-to-play," she added, referring to Ragnarok. It is the first time that the Ragnarok World Championship is going to be held outside South Korea. Asked about the prospects of online gaming in the country, Walker said the industry is still promising this year, given the good growth of revenues and number of users last year. She said that for Level Up!, fierce competition will lead to more people playing online games.