16th December 2009 by Diane
Online games closing in Europe
As the European online games market is becoming increasingly competitive, we are starting to see some casualties, games and companies not meeting the success they planned and closing operations or shutting some games down. In the recent weeks, the following closures have been announced, all in the Free to Play category:
- Italy-based Gametribe portal, operated by Game Media Networks, subsidiary of Digital Bros, a retail videogame distribution company, will be closing down on December 31st. The portal had already lost or not renewed the license for Dekaron from developer GameHi since September. It also operated action online game Infinity, cel-shading MMO Dreams of Mirror Online (DOMO) and football session game Kicks Online.
- UK and Spain-based company Rourke Online has seen its portal Key2Play and game servers disconnected after failing to pay for the hosting at the end of November. They were operating F2P MMOs Priston Tale 2 and Ys Online. Ys Online’s service termination had already been announced.
Tags: Aeria Games, Codemasters, europe, free to play, Gametribe, GOA, MMO
Posted in Events, ICO Partners
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)28th January 2009 by Diane
News roundup – 28/01/09
A few links of news for today :
- Nexon closes HumaNature studio (based in Canada, developers of Sugar Rush). As there were no news of the game since the end of Closed beta in December, we would be suprised if the title wasn’t cancelled.
ERRATUM : HumaNature was producing the game, not developing it, the developer is Klei Entertainment, which is not closing. HumaNature was working on unannouced new IP games. Thanks Daniel for the corrections!
- Online gaming gets 27% traffic growth yoy according to a new Comscore report. The online gaming display ad market grows with it, and gets upmarket as the ad clutter for the category diminishes. Most impressive growth is Spil’s network with +269% growth.
- Rumour : AOL selling Bebo? (were apparently disappointed by monetization vs projections)
- Paypal joins OpenID (that can give OpenID more credibility)
- GOA adds another True Games title to their portfolio by taking care of European operations for Possibility Space’s WarriorEpic .
- Gamigo brings Hanbitsoft’s steampunk MMO NeoSteam to Europe
- New study by DFC compares offline and online games publishers’ business models, online makes better profits , less risky.
- Gmail will have an offline option. (Convenient for anyone with a laptop, and helps overcome barriers to cloud-based service usage.)
Tags: AOL, Bebo, Gamigo, Gmail, GOA, Hanbitsoft, nexon, OpenID, Paypal, Spil Games, sugar rush, True Games, Warrior Epic
Posted in Events, ICO Partners
(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)