TECMO Koei's Singapore studio will be leading the Japanese video gaming giant's charge into the hot new area of social games.
On Thursday morning at 7am, Tecmo Koei Singapore will launch Jollywood, its first wholly made-in-Singapore game and the group's maiden international foray into a new game genre popularised by the likes of Mafia Wars and Farmville.
In recent years, social games, a relatively new genre that emphasises softer aspects like community and do not have pre-set victory conditions compared to traditional achievement-oriented video games, have enjoyed explosive growth alongside social networking sites like Facebook.
And unlike charging players a one-off purchase for the game, social games make money by getting their players to make smaller, but more frequent in-game purchases like bonus items.
The business model has turned out to be hugely lucrative for social game upstarts like Zynga, so much so that some market analysts are suggesting they may be worth as much as older, far more established players like Electronic Arts.
And Tecmo Koei, formed from a 2009 merger of Tecmo - the company behind titles like Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden and Koei, the famous studio that created the Romance of Three Kingdoms franchise - wants a piece of this action.
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