The local online game industry is expected to earn NT$11.29 billion (US$331.14 million) this year, showing year-on-year growth of 8.4 percent over last year, Taipei-based researcher Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute (MIC) said.
Casual games are expected to take up 46 percent of the market, showing strong momentum, with the rest of the market going to massive multi-player online role-playing games.
The game industry is growing fast around the world as Internet users turn to online games amid the global downturn and layoffs.
PHOTO: LIAO CHEN-HUEI, TAIPEI TIMES
Across the nation, game companies have posted stellar earnings reports as they brace for more good times ahead at the 2009 Taipei Game Show.
Albert Liu (劉柏園), chief executive officer and chairman of Gamania Digital Entertainment Co (游戲橘子), said: “At the present time, domestic gamers spend an average of NT$457 per month on online games, which is around one-half and one-quarter the amount spent by players in neighboring countries such as South Korea and Japan, respectively.”
If local game companies could provide more added-value, the potential growth in the industry could be explosive, Liu said.
Wayi International Digital Entertainment Co (華義國際) chairman Huang Bo-yi (黃博弘) yesterday concurred with Liu, saying that although the growth of the game industry is being felt more strongly in today’s poor economic times, even without the downturn, the industry grew at an average of 10 percent to 15 percent.
In related news, MIC analyst Luke Hsieh (謝子樵) said that across the country, 80 percent of gamers cited peer recommendations as the No. 1 reason behind choosing a particular online game, while social network recommendations and professional game reviews came in second and third at 55.5 percent and 34.6 percent, respectively.
Moreover, the analyst also found that players subscribe for online entertainment to be with friends and meet new people, suggesting strong stickiness.
Hsieh said he saw business in in-game advertising (IGA), and that social networking would benefit from this booming trend if they take advantage of players’ herd mentality to advertise related products and services directly on game sites, as well as drive traffic to specific social networking sites for other business opportunities.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
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TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
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