Asiasoft is a giant in its field. One of Southeast Asia’s most successful region-wide gaming companies, the online game publisher has hundreds of games in its portfolio and 120 million registered users. Its brand is synonymous with games like Audition, the wildly-successful Maplestory in Singapore and Malaysia, and Ragnarok Online in Thailand. Although Asiasoft’s mobile games portfolio hasn’t been as strong as its PC game catalog, it’s still a company that really understands what users want. But Asiasoft wasn’t started by a hardcore gamer or someone who had a dream for Southeast Asia’s gamers.
Pramoth Sudjitporn, Asiasoft CEO.
“We were just trying to make a living,” says Pramoth Sudjitporn, CEO and vice-chairman of Asiasoft, when asked why he and his two co-founders Sherman Tan and Lertchai Kanpai started a business centred around video games. Back in 1998, shortly after the 1997 economic crisis, no one was hiring. Companies were cutting costs and laying people off; some weren’t even paying salaries. Yet the trio founded a distributorship called BM Media, funded out of their own pockets. It was centred around the distribution of boxed educational games, because it was something that had market potential, yet remained untouched.
1998 was also a time when piracy was rife in Southeast Asian waters. No one wanted to deal with the sheer volume of additional work fighting piracy entailed. But Sudjitporn and his co-founders decided to take that chance. That was what started them off in the gaming business.
Their first solution, since prices that worked in the US and in markets like Singapore wouldn’t work in their native Thailand, was to bring down the price of these games by localizing products. There was a lot of local production done, including control measures to make sure the games didn’t leak out to other regions. By bringing the price down and bringing volumes up, BM Media was able to take advantage of the existing market potential.
But it was tiring to keep battling the pirates. And the world was changing. “Technology was shifting,” Sudjitporn says. “It was much more fun to play online [...] where you have a massive amount of players together. There’s more communication, more community, more participation.”
An early Asiasoft game carnival in Singapore, 2008.
It was that shift in technology that pushed Asiasoft into online gaming in 2001. Not only did online games show more potential for the business, they were also played on servers controlled by their service providers, making it easier to combat piracy. And they were boundless, which would allow the business to scale more easily in the future.
“When you look at online services and internet business, there are no boundaries, no territories, no physical location,” Sudjitporn explains. He and his co-founders believed that the Southeast Asian PC gaming market would grow soon enough.
However, Sudjitporn, being the savvy businessman he was, also realized that concentrating solely on online free-to-play was just too narrow-minded. So the company started talks with Blizzard Entertainment, bidding for rights to distribute World of Warcraft in the region. It was easy to reach out to Blizzard, since it was by then a subsidiary of Davidson & Associates, a corporation that had once been an education game giant – and a client of BM Media.
See: Why Blizzard needs a publisher for Hearthstone in Vietnam
Asiasoft eventually ended up distributing boxed Blizzard games. But at this point, the company was ready to scale and expand out of its native Thailand. Surprisingly, Sudjitporn says he wasn’t worried at all.
“The business is pretty much almost the same with other countries,” Sudjitporn said. “We believed we could duplicate [our] experience in Thailand in other countries.”
In 2004, Asiasoft expanded to Singapore. Asiasoft Online Ptd Ltd started with 20 to 30 staff, and this number quickly jumped to 100, and then 200, and finally 300. Today, Asiasoft has six offices with nearly 1,000 staff, though this number has probably dipped a little. We were tipped off to a couple of rounds of layoffs this year.
Still, getting to this point hasn’t been easy. Infrastructure and piracy have been two main issues that Asiasoft has long been battling. Back when the company first started out, Singapore was the only country within Southeast Asia to have a fast broadband connection. In Thailand, cybercafes were limited to the narrow 56kbps band. Technological infrastructure was something entirely out of Asiasoft’s control.
Because internet connectivity was so limited, gamers also weren’t aware of online gaming. Consumers were more used to LAN games like Counter-Strike, and so were cybercafe owners – especially since LAN gaming didn’t require any extra cost to set up.
So what Asiasoft did was to work with potential broadband providers. “We rode on that upcoming wave,” Sudjitporn says. Asiasoft linked arms with internet service providers and when bandwidth shot up and ADSL services launched, it was able to follow through on that same wave of growth. It also invested heavily in its own infrastructure.
In 2008, Asiasoft went public, raising US$30 million at that time. This allowed it to build several more verticals within its Asiasoft brand, including @cash, @cafe, @service, and @key. These services – with the exception of @cash – are only available in certain countries in the region, where there is more demand for them. @cafe refers to an Asiasoft-branded food and beverage outlet the cybercafe partnership program Asiasoft runs, which awards partner shops with bonuses for its players. @service is customer service specifically for Asiasoft games, and @key works as an authenticator, allowing users to have a second level of security for their game accounts. Rounding it up is @cash, Asiasoft’s own brand of game credits.
It also acquired the company Level Up Inc., a games publisher and operator based in the Philippines, this year. According to this company report, Level Up was acquired to support Asiasoft’s core gaming services.
See: Philippines: Asiasoft practically owns Level Up now
The future of online gaming
To Sudjitporn, the future of gaming is not as simple as saying it’s going mobile. “You’re moving the screen,” he said. In the past ten years or so, gamers have been stuck in one screen, be it for PC or console. So the shifts in genre, in taste, in player preferences, have all been only in content. But with mobile in the picture, it’s now a shift of both platforms and technology.
At the launch of Ragnarok Online 2 in Singapore, 2012.
Add that to the involvement of third-parties like iTunes and Google Play, and you get the entire ecosystem evolving. “If we did something like Hearthstone back then,” Sudjitporn explains, “It would be just Blizzard and us. But now there’s a third guy, Apple and Google.”
Yet on a regional level, Asiasoft hardly feels threatened. Each company trying to compete with it is usually very local. “Some companies try, like Cubinet and Cubizone,” Sudjitporn says, “but they have a hard time.” He admits that the company’s biggest competitor is Garena. But that doesn’t particularly worry him either.
“In Thailand, every company pushes very hard. Some companies are strong in MMO [games], some are strong in FPS [games], some are strong in casual [games]. Gaining ground in other countries is much more stressful compared to Singapore. And we need to expand because we came from MMO [games]. Expand to different types of MMO, different types of casual, expand to other things. That’s how we retain our competitive edge.”
Sudjitporn adds that not a lot of people grabbed the publishing opportunity before, and now it’s tough for people to start. “Anyone who comes in [now],” he says, “you’re either very bold or you have a very big pocket.”
Asiasoft moving forward
So what’s next for Asiasoft? Sudjitporn says that now, the company needs to go back and review what’s good for each device it wants to publish for. He likened Asiasoft’s lengthy existence in the gaming industry with being a singer. Older singers have a lower success rate, he said, because they keep releasing album after album. It’s the same for games: a publisher that got successful from publishing games will continue to acquire to expand, and problems will arise when it repeats the same cycle without changing anything in the face of an evolving market.
Sudjitporn says what Asiasoft can do now is to try and understand why they made the mistakes they did. Citing the Korean fantasy golf game Pangya as a mistake the company made, Sudjitporn says that the team who decided not to pick up the game for the market did so because it couldn’t see its appeal. “The team said Pangya was childish because people wanted realistic golf games,” Sudjitporn explains, adding that he himself is a golfer, and he wondered who would ever like the game. EA Games had, at this time, also released its realistic Tiger Woods PGA Tour video game. However, Pangya proved to be a huge hit, both inside and outside of Thailand.
While PC online gaming will still be part of Asiasoft’s publishing catalogue, it’s going to continue moving into mobile. Sudjitporn says that consoles are too inflexible an environment for the company to deal with, not to mention the platform on a whole is still plagued by piracy.
See: eSports are in, and why mobile will not replace PC gaming
Asiasoft has five to seven mobile games in the publishing pipeline now, with each country in the region getting access to different ones. “Mobile moves very fast, and its shelf life is short,” Sudjitporn says. “We could keep launching it like what you see on the App or Play stores. They won’t tell you ‘here’s what’s coming out next month.’ It just happens.” He says mobile launches by Asiasoft will be different from their PC game launches, which typically have to align with what the games’ developers or licensors want. With more preparation time for mobile, Asiasoft will be the one who has control over when a good day to launch is.
Despite its success with PC games, and its horizontal shift into mobile, the company is still looking outside of gaming for its future endeavors. “Anything online and internet that has become [a] product and [a] service, Asiasoft will look into that,” Sudjitporn says, when asked about the shift to being a “total online entertainment service provider” mentioned in Asiasoft’s quarterly report. “When you talk about the internet world, it’s much bigger than gaming. It can be anything.”
This post How Asiasoft went from moving educational games to being one of SEA’s largest publishers appeared first on Tech in Asia.
How Asiasoft went from moving educational games to being one of SEA’s largest publishers
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