With this investment CDC Games will begin to position itself as much more than a publisher of games in China. In addition to the exclusive rights for distribution in China of Gorilla Banana's first game, the much anticipated Red Blood, CDC Games will have exclusive rights to distribution in India. Company officials view India as the world's next emerging games market and this expansion will further distance CDC Games from its legacy competitors in China. This is also viewed as the first step in a continuing expansion that will leverage the global infrastructure established by the CDC family of companies including offices in over 30 countries and more than 400 software engineers and developers in India. To further enable this expansion, CDC Games will continue to leverage its initiatives thus far to establish exclusive partnerships with proven, world class designers, developers and publishers.
Gorilla Banana is an independent, online games development company founded in February 2006 whose founders include Musik Jung, Jung-Uk Lee and Do-Hyung Lim, who were formerly game directors at NCsoft, the largest online game publisher in South Korea. Mr. Jung was founding chairman of the Korea Game Developers Association from 1999 to 2005. In November 2006, Gorilla Banana executives were joined by former executive members of Grigon Entertainment, Chanjoon Kim, former COO of Grigon and Chun-Hyok Chong, former head of development of Grigon. Korea-based Grigon Entertainment and Atlanta-based Cartoon Network currently have a co-development partnership that will launch The Cartoon Network Universe MMORPG (massive multiplayer online game) for the global marketplace in 2008. Gorilla Banana will launch their first game Red Blood, a free-to-play MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) based on an immensely popular comic book series in Korea, in 2008.
The free-to-play model is very familiar territory for CDC Games. With Yulgang, the company's current blockbuster online game in China, CDC Games pioneered the free-to-play, pay-for-merchandise market for online games in China. The company already has an established following of over 37 million registered users of Yulgang and as a result, CDC Games has quickly become a leader in online and mobile games in China and is expecting continued strong growth due to the huge popularity of games in that country.
"CDC Games is one of the most successful online game companies in China and we are delighted to have them as an investor," said Chanjoon Kim, co-CEO of Gorilla Banana. "With the investment and their breadth of operations and expertise in China, the world's largest online games market, we expect to see significant success of our online games in the global marketplace."
"Our investment in Gorilla Banana will provide us with future innovative and highly popular online games for our China and India markets that will fuel our continued strong growth," said Xiaowei Chen, CEO of CDC Games. "We firmly believe this will be a very successful partnership because of their impressive expertise and proven track record in delivering widely popular and innovative online games for the global marketplace, and will enable us to position ourselves as more than a publisher of online games."
CDC Games also plans to launch its licensed The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, a MMORPG based on the literary works of J.R.R. Tolkien, next year and has licensed two additional widely popular games in the Asian markets, "Special Force" and "Stone Age 2", both also planned for delivery in China next year.
By CDC Corporation
Posted January 1st, 2007 by Nymphadora
