Garena Getting into the F2P MMO Business?

It seems like Garena, the app best known for allowing gamers to compete against each other via a hamachii sort of Lan, is getting into the free to play MMO business. I remember using Garena to play Defense of the Ancients (DotA) with my friends and others back when my buddies didn’t all have CD keys to play on battle.net. Nowadays we can play free to play aion of strife games like League of Legends from Riot Games and Land of Chaos Online from Alaplaya, so we don’t exactly need to use Garena anymore. But thousands of people, mostly outside of the U.S, still use it to play various games with each other. I think most people use it when they pirate games and don’t have CD Keys – playing through Garena allows them to play multiplayer without a cd key or a valid account. Garena is quite big today but it’s slowly transforming itself into an MMO publisher. The company already publishes the MMOFPS Blackshot in both Europe and Asia (No U.S. Version of the game exists. Outspark, best known for Fiesta Online and Fists of Fu was supposed to publish it, but they never did.).

Aside from Blackshot, Garena also has Go Kart, which is the same exact game as GoGo Racer, which GamersFirst published for a short while. The game never launched in North America, as GamersFirst postponed it, along with Parabellum, delayed Go Kart indefinitely. It’s too bad actually, as the game itself wasn’t that bad. I mean aside from Racing Star: Come on Baby, it was the only silly Kart Racing MMO out there. Nexon used to have Kart Rider, but they shut that down years ago (In North America. It remains popular in South Korea). Unfortunately, like Blackshot – Go Kart isn’t available world-wide. Instead, the game is restricted to only a handful of regions. Another neat thing about Garena is that they inked a deal with S2 Games to publish Heroes of Newerth in certain regions as a Avalon Heroes / League of Legends style free to play game. In Europe and North America, the game remains buy to play – just like Guild Wars.

I think the biggest problem Garena has having is the lack of global licenses. If Garena published say Priston Tale 2 world-wide, I think the game would be quite successful. Currently the game is ONLY available in EU and South East Asia. No one in North America can play it. The cool thing about Netmarble and Aeria Games is that they have a lot of games available on the international level. Netmarble for example publishes Uncharted Waters Online, a Voyage Century / Pirates of the burning Sea style game world-wide with no IP restrictions (Except Japan / Korea). Aeria Games has several IP restriction free games too including the new Legendary Champions and Dynasty Warriors Online. Having games without IP restrictions is a big deal, as everyone can play on the same service. Having the game’s audience fragmented only makes the game feel more empty. At least that’s how I feel on the whole MMO IP ban thing. I sort of hope someone offers Argo Online or Luvinia Online world-wide as I don’t want that game to have IP restrictions. Garena offered their VPN / LAN services world-wide, so seeing them publish games is cool, but it sucks that all of their games have so many IP restrictions. I don’t think they have any game published in North America.

9Dragons Relaunches on GamersFirst – Woot!

GamersFirst, the free to play MMO publisher best known for War Rock, Knight Online and Sword 2 recently relaunched 9Dragons. 9Dragons is a 3D martial arts themed MMORPG that the now defunct Acclaim Games used to publish. Playdom – the social games company behind Market Street, Kogaumu, and a handful of other facebook games actually bought playdom in early 2010. The purchase was clearly a mistake, as Playdom shut down the Acclaim website along with ALL of the games Acclaim used to publish (Including 9Dragons). Luckily, GamersFirst saw this as an oppurtunity to expand and bought the North American license to run 9Dragons from Indy21 (The independent Korean game developer who made 9Dragons). I’m actually not too surprised that 9Dragons was brought back to life as it was easily the most popular MMORPG that Acclaim had. I personally wasn’t a big fan of the game, as the graphics were a bit lacking and the interface felt a bit clumsy. For martial arts themed games I’d much rather play Twelve Sky 2 or even World of Kung Fu than 9Dragons. I’m not saying 9Dragons is bad, because it isn’t. The game has a fairly sizable playerbase, so there’s clearly something to the game.

I think 9Dragons is successful because it’s one of the most PvP heavy martial arts MMORPGs out. The game has 9 “clans” and two factions. The factions are at war with each other and the game also features open ended PvP where players can pretty much PK each other anywhere in the game world. Dragon Raja, Conquer Online and Legend of Edda are some of the only other MMORPGs with open world PvP. Plus, the faction battles in 9Dragons should keep things interesting. They aren’t as ridiculous as the 1000 vs 1000 faction battles of Aika Online, but the PvP in 9Dragons beats the PvP in more modern games like Runes of Magic and Heroes of Three Kingdoms. I do suspect that some of the newer PvP MMORPGs like King of Kings 3 may be superior, but only time will tell whether those games will be successful or not. 9Dragons has already proven itself to be a sustainable game over the last 3+ years. The game launched in North America and Europe back in early 2007 in case you guys didn’t know.

My only concern about 9Dragons is that it might not be able to “keep up” with new MMORPGs like The Lord of the Rings Online and EverQuest 2 which both recently became free to play games. Sony Online Entertainment also announced that they will be making Pirates of the Burning Sea free to play too. These are just the pay to play MMORPGs going free to play. There are a ton of triple-a free to play MMORPGs which launched this year including Vindictus from Nexon, Uncharted Waters Online from Netmarble and Forsaken World from Perfect World Entertainment may eventually put 9Dragons out of business. It’s difficult for older games to compete with newer ones with vastly superior graphics. Some people pretend that graphics aren’t important, but the fact is graphics do matter. People tend to like games with better graphics. It’s just the way it is.

So will 9Dragons be a success on GamersFirst or no? Will it be able to compete against newer MMORPGs? I personally think it can’t, but only time will tell.